Seen In the Press

["Chanliau, Marc" <MChanliau@netegrity.com>]

Some weeks ago we were called upon to elect a new chairperson (or
co-chairpersons, as it were), following Eve's resignation. 

Right before the vote took place, Securant's Darryl Platt made a remark
cautioning people that voting for the Netegrity representative (Prateek
Mishra) would be dangerous because Netegrity would claim to have invented
SAML (I don't recall Darryl's exact words, so I'm not quoting him). At the
time, much to the amazement of my colleagues on the call, I decided not to
address Darryl's unfair (and unfounded) remark.

Before and after the election of our new co-chairpersons, I've had the
privilege to present SAML in several European countries (sometimes in a
foreign language) in addition to the US, on behalf of my company. We've
never made the claim that SAML was Netegrity's invention, as Darryl would
have it.  

However, in this week's issue of Infoworld, Brian Fonseca reported on Web
Services security mentioning Netegrity, Securant, and Oblix ("Aegis forged
for Web services", Infoworld 07.23.01, p. 22). 
Here is a passage of that article:
"Securant helped pioneer the AuthXML standards proposal, which eventually
became the Web security standard SAML [...]." Since I don't believe Fonseca
made that up, "somebody" had to tell him!

I think it's fair for a company to take some of the credit for SAML, and
Securant can certainly do that because they have contributed quite a lot to
the standard, as others have. However, I don't think Darryl's earlier remark
was judicious in light of this recent article.

I know that we all love to hate an undisputed market leader, but we also all
need to practice what we preach...

Marc Chanliau
Sr. Product Manager
Netegrity, Inc.