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Subject: RE: [saml-dev] SAML Usage Statistics?


I have been listening to this discussion with some bemusement. SAML is a standard for interoperability, not a technology. Vendors such as RSA, Netegrity, BEA, Oblix, OpenNetwork, HP and others sell high function identity management solutions with a variety of capabilities. These vendors can provide lots of data to help you make a business case for this kind of functionality. If you are a small company who does not need to interoperate with other organizations and you buy or build a solution which provides the capabilities you need, SAML or Liberty probably provide no quantifiable benefit. (In other words the benefit of a proprietary or SAML-based solution is the same.) The only benefit comes from the ease of possible future interoperability.

If on the other hand, you expect to participate in what Liberty calls a Circle of Trust, e.g. Shiboleth, the Federal Portal or some commercial venture providing SAML-based federation (AOL?) then you will only be able to do so by following the Profile defined for that deployment. In other words, the benefit does not come from "doing SAML" but from following some specific Profile that others are following. 

Even if you intend to build your own solution and want to use SAML merely to reduce your design effort, I would argue that there is little benefit unless you follow (or develop) a specific profile. The Assertions and Protocols are just too generic to provide engineering guidance. Everything that SAML does has been done many times before in proprietary ways. SAML's benefit is not what it does, but that it is a standard.

So if you want to cost justify something, it is not SAML per se. It is Web SSO or Identity Federation with organization X or Interoperability with Authorization Provider Y or something of that sort.

Hal
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Eve L. Maler [mailto:Eve.Maler@Sun.COM]
> Sent: Friday, June 04, 2004 12:04 PM
> To: saml-dev@lists.oasis-open.org
> Subject: Re: [saml-dev] SAML Usage Statistics?
> 
> 
> On the theory that others might be interested in the 
> suggestion I made 
> privately to Barton earlier...  The Burton Group has done a number of 
> studies and surveys in this area.  Even if you don't have access to 
> their for-pay stuff, they have some guest-access materials 
> that might be 
> interesting.  The following link does a query on their free materials 
> for "saml":
> 
> http://search.burtongroup.com/pub/query.html?col=pub&ht=0&qp=&;
qt=saml&qs=&qc=&pw=100%25&ws=0&qm=0&st=1&nh=10&lk=1&rf=0&rq=0&si=1&Submit1=+search+

	Eve

Barton Stanley wrote:

> I'm attempting to determine if I can build a
> fact-based business case that justifies the adoption
> of SAML if an organization's business partners have
> not yet adopted it.
> 
> If an organization's business partners have not
> adopted SAML then if the organization does adopt it
> then it is left with the task of "selling" SAML to its
> partners if its investment in SAML is to pay off.
> 
> Are there any SAML usage statistics or any other
> information that might help me build the business case
> I describe above?
> 
> If this is not the proper forum for my query, I'd
> appreciate any pointers to other forums that might be
> more appropriate.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Barton Stanley
> 
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> 

-- 
Eve Maler                                        +1 781 442 3190
Sun Microsystems                            cell +1 781 354 9441
Web Products, Technologies, and Standards    eve.maler @ sun.com


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