Roger Sullivan Blog

As I write this, we're flying northbound, about two hundred miles from the North Pole on the Polar route from Chicago to Hong Kong for a Sponsor meeting of the Liberty Alliance.  The Alliance meets several times per year in venues that are relatively close to our member companies.  The various expert groups will spend their time advancing the technology, business, and policy work of the Alliance to meet the needs of our members as well as the identity management market.  Additionally, we have meetings with several enterprise customers and vendors in Hong Kong to discuss their membership in the Alliance.

The Liberty Alliance is a standards organization with about 150 members from around the world.  Members represent enterprise organizations from manufacturing, telecommunications, financial services, governments, non-profit organizations, and vendors.  All of these organizations have come together to develop business and technology standards for identity management.

The Liberty Alliance is just one of the many standards initiatives in which Oracle invests considerable time and resources.  Open standards are important to our customers and they are important to the company.  Standards give our customers choices and make it easier for us to quickly integrate innovative technologies into comprehensive business solutions.

This trip is a study in contrasts for me.  I've transited through the new Hong Kong International Airport (HKG) and it is a beautiful, well-designed transportation center.  But I must confess that I'm nostalgic for the armrest-gripping landings at Kai Tak Airport that HKG replaced in 1998.  In those days, a passenger could literally see - at eye level - into the apartments of the buildings that edged the runways.  It seemed that they were just yards off the wing tips.  I can clearly remember seeing Kowloon families sitting in front of television sets in their apartments as the plane touched down.

The United 747-400 in which I'm a passenger is itself a contrast to days past.

About six miles from where I live was one of the better known ship yards of New England in the mid-1800's.  From this relatively small harbor-side port were launched eight of the famous square-rigged clipper ships that traveled the world.  These ships were captained by men living in homes down the street from my home.  As one strolls through the neighborhood, it's easy to imagine these young men, fresh from a voyage walking up the street from the harbor to greet their anxious families who hadn't seen them in many months.

They were indeed young men.  Those who "went down to the sea in ships" often did so as young teenagers, first serving as cooks and gradually earning their way through experience into positions of more authority.  If they were good enough, they might one day be given command of their own ship.  Captains usually were in their thirties.

By contrast, a clipper ship weighs about one thousand tons.  A 747 has a payload capacity of 144,000 pounds.  A clipper ship was between 180 and a little over 200 feet in length.  A 747 has a wing-span of 195 feet and is 231 nose to tail.  I will make the trip from my home to hotel in Hong Kong in a bit under 24 hours total elapsed time.  The fastest recorded voyage from the Far East to London was 67 days by the Cutty Sark.

One notable adventure pitted two brothers from my town, Allison and Levi Howes in a race from Calcutta to Boston.  Allison Howes' ship, the Belle of the West, left Calcutta twelve hours ahead of Levi, who was master of the Starlight.  Seventeen thousand miles later, Belle of the West arrived in Boston twelve hours ahead of Starlight -  a virtual dead heat.  Mind you that the race was incidental to the true purpose of these men and their ships which was commerce.

Clipper ships were designed for speed in order to get valuable cargo like spices and silks to European and eastern United States trading centers more quickly.  Their purpose was to shrink the globe as much as the techology of the day would allow.  Clipper ships continued to be the 747's of their time until the steam engine proved itself as the new technology to be more reliable and faster than wind power.  Today, there are but a few of these magnificent sailing ships remaining as museums to a by-gone era.  

Today, an abundance of fiber optic communications cable has improved the worldwide information transit time to the speed of light.  The implications of this have been explored in a very thoughtful book, The World is Flat, by Thomas Friedman.  It is recommended reading - no, essential reading - for anyone engaged in commerce today.

In a flat world, relationships are no longer based on face-to-face interactions.  In many cases, we can achieve our business mission in a networked world without meeting the person with whom we're doing business.

Essential to these relationships is identity management.  We need to be able to rely on a network of suppliers, partners joining together to bring products and services to customers - all of whom are interconnected through identity management solutions.

Identity management provides the security of knowing who has access to what information and for what purpose.  Good identity management solutions enable business to rely confidently on these access controls and provide audit capability to ensure that one can easily prove compliance with relevant regulations.

In the same way as sailing captains of 150 years ago relied on letters of introduction in their relationships with far-away merchants, so we rely today on standards-based electronic authentication tokens to securely present identity and authorization credentials to trading partners.

Today, the speed and ease of this interconnectedness allows us to create new relationships far more quickly than even a few years ago and at far less cost.  These dynamic relations allow us to grow our businesses in ways that previous generations could only dream about.

For instance, a manufacturer in the U.S. can provide an Asian supplier access to its own inventory control system so that the supplier is effectively managing its customer's inventory directly from half a world away.  This is done through a contractual relationship whereby the manufacturer and supplier agree to acceptable minimum and maximum inventory levels.  The supplier is then completely responsible for ensuring that the inventory levels stay within these agreed-upon levels.  Identity management ensures that only the authorized supplier employees are accessing the manufacturer's systems.  Moreover, the identities of these individuals and access credentials are managed completely by the supplier - not the manufacturer.  The manufacturer's systems merely recognize that the identity token comes from an authorized source and is of the proper form.

This process relieves the manufacturer from having to manage the supplier's employees.  The supplier manages their own employees and ensures, under service level agreements, that only authorized employees will be granted access credentials to the manufacturer's inventory systems.  The manufacturer does not have to keep track of the supplier's hiring, terminations, and job transfers.  This saves the manufacturer the time and cost of managing another company's employees.  Multiplying this across many supplier relationships has the potential of thousands of dollars in cost savings per year.  Moreover, it provides the manufacturer increased flexibility in its supplier relations because of this standards-based identity exchange.  The distance between the supply chain participants is shrinking dramatically.

Oracle has assembled an impressive suite of identity management products over the past two years by strategically acquiring specialized identity management companies that were already successful in their own right.  By selecting companies that were standards-compliant, Oracle has been able to quickly integrate them into a flexible, cohesive, and comprehensive solution set for our customers.