Novell is today (15 July) outlining an 18-month roadmap for its
eDirectory server software, dubbed Project Destiny, which will
extend secure identity management to every aspect of Web
services.
The software maker has been praised by analysts for heading in the
right direction but the only product that is expected to ship by
the end of the year is the Universal Description, Discovery and
Integration (UDDI) server that is being built on Novell's
eDirectory server.
"They have a lot of good ideas and they've had them for a while but
when are they going to deliver?" Mike Neuenschwander, an analyst at
Burton Group, said. "They're trying to jump the gun and be a
thought leader. It's more important for them to be a product
leader."
However, Novell may be ahead of the demand curve with Web services
and UDDI. IT departments have hardly been rushing to build Web
services or use public UDDI repositories that can help them find
information about how their trading partners want to
interact.
The first part of Novell's directory services roadmap calls for the
addition of a server to its eDirectory that will bring user
authentication and access control to UDDI registries. That will
allow authorised users to add information to and query information
from UDDI registries, according to Ed Anderson, director of product
management for the company's identity services group.
Anderson anticipated that large companies would start to deploy
internal UDDI repositories next year. He predicted that some would
experiment with the federation of their internal repositories so
they can share information with business partners. "It will become
more prominent in 2004 and forward," he said.
Neuenschwander said the UDDI server represents only "one-sixteenth"
of what Novell wants to do through its Destiny roadmap. "The
marketing guys are getting ahead of the engineering guys," he
said.
No timetable was announced for several key pieces of the plan.
Novell simply said that they would be delivered next year.
Those pieces include native support for XML and the Simple Object
Access Protocol (Soap) in the eDirectory server; a single point of
management for user identities drawn from multiple applications and
services and a rules-based engine that will help directories manage
user access to network resources. The roadmap also includes a
federated system that will allow businesses to securely share
identity information with business partners.
Anderson said the initial pieces would be modular add-ons to
eDirectory, which is the foundation of Project Destiny.
John Enck, an analyst at research group Gartner, said the real
value in Novell's directory services plan will be from policy-based
identity management, which will allow more users to be administered
by fewer people.
"You're not going to have to burn IT resources for a simple task
like adding or maintaining user information in multiple
directories," Enck said.