Many of our customers are implementing or considering the implementation of hosted application services (aka SaaS). The benefits are obvious because your support burden is reduced whether that be due to increased resource utilization, hardware savings, software savings or otherwise.

Recently I was reviewing some provisioning statistics for one of our customers using our ARMS and DSS products. I see these statistics on a daily basis because we build that into all of our IDM solutions. This week I took a minute more to really look at the numbers and put them in perspective. Here are the statistics for student provisioning at this customer site for a 24-hour period:

Every organization running more than one system has a need to synchronize data. For different systems the type of data may be different but it is still just data. In all cases you have a "source" system and a "target" system. Wikipedia defines data synchronization as "the process of establishing consistency among data from a source to a target data storage and vice versa and the continuous harmonization of the data over time."

Back in the good old days of NetWare, if you wanted to see all registered services in SLP, you would simply type: display slp services and the full list would appear on your screen.

There was a time when user expectations were simple. Give them some text, maybe a button or two and they were content. White and black were perfectly good colors. Why would you want pictures cluttering up your 640 x 480 workspace anyway?

During an identity management project, we frequently have discussions with our customers about provisioning via workflow. Some customers expect that they will have to deploy workflow to perform any type of provisioning while others hope to fully automate the entire process.

I don’t know about you but I am a thinker in the car. Perhaps that’s because with traffic there is really nothing else to do BUT think.