On the heels of the Oracle-Sun Merger.....
I follow Mark closely and he's on target with his Identity Management market analysis at Burton Group/Gartner.
On 27-Jan, Oracle signaled a commitment to SPML, one of the strong points from Sun's Identity Manager product. Thomas Kurian indicated that SPML adapters would be integrated into the Oracle Fusion middleware (ie. Oracle/Waveset Identity Manager).
SPML Is On Life Support ....
Blogger: Mark Diodati (01-Feb-2009)
The SPML standard-like all emerging standards-requires more work. More work is required to harmonize SPML with SAML. An optional "inetorgperson-like" user schema is required to promote greater SPML adoption (the OASIS Provisioning Services Technical Committee tried to create a standard user schema when developing SPML v2, but the members could not agree on one). A simpler "real world" search capability is needed, with a limitation on the number of attributes and filter expressions. The latter two requirements should be combined into a future "SPML Simple" profile.
Unfortunately, there appears to be little industry support for SPML enhancements. A vicious cycle exists. Few people are using the standard, so there's less momentum to enhance it. The IdM vendors' participation in the OASIS Provisioning Services Technical Committee has been minimal at best since the 2006 approval of the SPML v2 standard. The last meeting of the Committee was in early 2008. None of the major provisioning vendors have developed an SPML v2-conformant product. Many of the vendors who have created commercial SPML connectors tell us that they must create specific SPML implementations for each of the major provisioning products. An SPML reference implementation does not exist, but would surely help.
