Lots of New Product

Earlier this week I went out to dinner with a couple of colleagues, including Kiet.  Now when Kiet says "I know a good chinese restaurant" it is generally a good idea to suggest you accompany him there.  On arrival I convinced the rest of the party to just let Kiet order the food.  I have absoutely no idea what I eat when I go out with Kiet, he always orders in Chinese and I'm not convinced it is always on the menu.  What I do know is that the food will always be somewhere between excellent and outstanding.

The bottom line is I trust Kiet.  In the middleware space a lot of Oracle's recent acquisitions have been about trust.  Who do you trust to access what.  The acquisition of various identity management products have all helped Oracle to provide support to two key issues.

• What resources can an individual access


• What individuals have access to a resource

If we want to secure a system then the above questions are used to drive an access management policy that may be implemented using
COREid Access & Identity (formerly an Oblix product).  If we want to grant and revoke priviliges in response to these questions then we may do this provisioning through
Exellerate (formerly a THOR product).  If we want to present a single system view of the answers to these questions from existing resources then we may use a
Virtual Directory solution (formerly an OctetString product).uct).

All the above adds up to a lot of new product for my sales consultants to learn, fortunately we have kept the original sales teams and are using them as in-depth product experts to complement the local sales teams.  However it does mean that my team have spent an awful lot of time in training this year.

For me it has been a great way of widening my horizons.  
Identity Management is a hot topic with business concerns such as compliance driving lots of new business.  In the Service Oriented Architecture space security is a major headache because building systems from services means that when a service is invoked it is often difficult to tell on whose behalf the request is being made.

All this brings us back to Trust.  I trust Kiet because I recognise him.  In the SOA space we need to use a variey of technologies to ensure that services can have the same degree of trust about executing functions on behalf of a requestor.  In a later blog I hope to look at how different Identity Managment components can be combined to provide end to end security.

In the meantime if Kiet suggests you eat Chines with him, take my word for it, trust him!

p.s. Kiet has just started his
own blog so pop over and take a look.