Sun looks to Europe as it develops identity plans

LONDON - Regulatory compliance and the delivery of location-based mobile services are two areas in which Sun Microsystems will sharpen focus over the next 12 months as it seeks to build on the robust growth seen in its identity management business.

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Demands in these areas are being led by European customers, and Sun will be working with telecommunications operators, consulting partners and its direct sales force in the region to deliver new offerings, according to Sara Gates, the company's vice president of identity management marketing.

"For the first time Europe is exceeding identity management growth over other regions," Gates said during an interview in London Friday.

The Texas-based executive was on a two-week European trip to talk to partners and clients on the heels of the launch of Sun's latest ID management product. The Sun Java Identity Auditor, rolled out in the U.S. in late January, allows companies to audit individuals' system-access activities. It is aimed at companies that want to meet legislative regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley financial and accounting disclosure act, which require businesses to report on who has access to critical information systems.

Many European organizations face complex issues, such as requirements for complying with cross-border regulations and the need to manage geographically dispersed staff, and these areas present new opportunities for Sun, Gates said. So too do European government and private-sector organizations that are seeking to address issues like migration, health care and e-government using identity management.

However, Gates said she sees Sun's product line as offering "horizontal solutions" and not specialized products for the public and private sectors.

"Instead, I see specialized knowledge," she said, indicating Sun's consulting partners and sales teams.

That said, small and medium-size businesses, which make up over two-thirds of the European market, require packaged identity management offerings that can automate a variety of business processes across borders, Gates noted. Sun is likely to target them with products like Auditor, which offers features such as automated certification reviews and compliance reports.

Security is also a hot topic when it comes to identity management, given the recent worldwide growth in identity theft. However, Sun plans to continue to partner with security providers rather than build in its own new security features. The company already counts on Symantec to provide security capabilities for Auditor, such as the ability to report unauthorized system access.

"We're seeing a collision between the worlds of security and identity management because ID brings intelligence to security," said Don Bowen, director of Sun's Directory Server Enterprise Edition.

RFID (radio frequency identification) also combines security and identity capability and Gates predicted that the next year will bring offerings that can, for instance, allow clients to secure a system by tracking its location and recording who has access to that system through identity management technology.

RFID has real security benefits because it links who somebody is to where they are located, Gates said.

Identity management can also be used to deliver location-based services to mobile devices, Gates said. Sun is already working with Germany's Deutsche Telekom to offer identity management for the operator's 80 million users.

Gates expects Deutsche Telekom and other European operators to start rolling out location-based services in the near future, allowing them to send users text messages telling them where the closest coffeehouse or theater is, for example.

Sun's identity business has grown substantially in recent quarters in terms of both revenue and new customers, Gates said, making it an important strategy area for the Santa Clara, California, company.

But while Gates emphasized that Sun wants to help companies address broad identity management needs, closer cooperation with Microsoft to provide joint customers with seamless identity management is not in the cards. Although the former rivals entered a surprise cooperation accord last year, saying they will allow information to be more easily shared between Microsoft's Active Directory and Sun's Java System Identity Server identity management products, there has been no word about further collaboration in the identity area.

"We are of two minds," Gates said. "We stand together on standards and interoperability -- we are working behind the scenes and it's taking time -- but we are competitors."

Sun plans to continue taking a leading role in identity management, Gates said, despite efforts by other big vendors to become more active in the area. Oracle, for example, purchased identity management technology developer Oblix last month so it could integrate Oblix's security software into its infrastructure products. Gates didn't see the move as a threat, saying that application providers like Oracle are focused on providing identity management for their own products, unlike Sun whose strategy is to target heterogenous environments.

"Oracle and the other big application providers are used to seeing themselves as the center of a universe. Our strategy is to offer identity management for everyone," Gates said.