Love this blog from Ping Identity — Top 10 Things That IT Does in Tough Times. I couldn’t agree more about the uptake on open source. We’ve seen a significant increase in OpenSSO activity over the last two months and attribute this to organizations looking for open source identity alternatives during these tough times. Check out our month by month message activity in the OpenSSO Project below.

The Sun Writers have been popping our tons of great technical articles of late on how to use OpenSSO 8. The latest one shows how to use OpenSSO and simpleSAMLphp to federate between an identity provider application written in Java and a service provider application written in php. The article uses SugarCRM, an open source php application, as an example. Check out the article and try it out if you have time!

I’m thrilled to say we were positioned as a leader in the Gartner WAM MQ again this year. I’m very happy with the results and encourage you to focus on the strengths and weaknesses of each vendor rather than the color of the pretty dots. Below is the image and Sun’s strengths and weaknesses. We thought our growth was pretty impressive last year, Gartner didn’t agree. Don’t worry about that though, because we’re just getting started. In fact, our product revenue grew by 30% last year. If you’re interested in reading the whole report click here.

SUN MICROSYSTEMS
Product: Sun OpenSSO Enterprise (formerly Sun Access Manager)
Sun is a leader in the WAM market, due to a combination of technical platform expertise, diverse and experienced partnerships in consulting and SI; a growing customer base; and consistent customer service. OpenSSO Enterprise is a full-featured product, with identity federation, SOA capabilities and built-in Web services security functions.
Strengths

* Due to technical platform expertise, diverse and experienced partnerships in consulting and SI, a growing customer base, and consistent customer service, Sun is a leader in the WAM market.

* OpenSSO Enterprise is a full-featured product, with built-in identity federation, SOA capabilities and Web services security functions.

* Sun plays a leadership role in open-source WAM through the OpenSSO project, which gives the company a potential customer base and the benefit of the efforts of the community that has developed around OpenSSO. When this option is included, Sun has the widest variety of pricing options for a WAM offering, and also has appealing standard pricing.

* Sun has focused on ancillary functionality to ease deployment, including federation partner offerings (“fedlets”), as well as standard, out-of-the-box task-based workflows.

* Sun’s Partner Advantage Program remains a model for covering consulting, system integration, VAR and independent software vendor (ISV) needs for IAM customers.

* OpenSSO Enterprise now includes Microsoft SharePoint support and a fully functional security token service.

Caution

* Sun has a large customer base for OpenSSO Enterprise; however, growth in the customer base was relatively flat in 2007.