15 June, 2006 - 4:26pm

It's great to see the increased focus on user-centrism at the annual Burton Group Catalyst conference. President Jamie Lewis remarked in his opening keynote that there's a lot of hype around it being a solution for privacy and identity theft and that there's diverging opinions as to how we'll achieve an identity metasystem -- whether it's Microsoft, Higgins, or DIX. Of note, analyst Mike Neuenschwander stated identity appliances and user-centric products such as those by Microsoft and Sxip, are two of the three emerging identity management technologies.

Jamie commented that there are now more user-centric identity protocols than you can shake a stick at, stating that DIX support of SAML 2.0 is especially interesting and that DIX might be a middle ground for meeting the wide spectrum of needs for an Internet identity system between that of the WS* approach of strong security and the Web 2.0 approach that is lightweight. Some of the talks are available via podcast for free, and are worth checking out.