Mark Diodati of Burton Group wrote an interesting piece this morning which describes the trials and tribulations facing adoption of SPML (Service Provisioning Markup Language).

We've watched SPML closely over the years here at Ping, just as we watch the development of all standards which touch within the realm of Intra-company identity management. A few years back in fact, we even wrote our own SPML engine, which was our first step towards full-blown support of SPML to facilitate federated provisioning. We postponed the project after doing deeper market research, and discovering that we were a bit too early to market, and that enterprises weren't quite ready for it.

The market has matured significantly since then, and the need for centralized control over SaaS and cloud provisioning events is needed more than ever, however, having spent several years seeing SAML get to where it is today, I completely understand the challenges of getting markets to hit that tipping point of standardization.

What Mark refers to as the need for a SPML lite is the equivilent of the SAML happy path which over hundreds of customers and thousands of connections, we were able to effectively create here at Ping for the B2B Internet SSO marketplace.

Importance of Independent Pure Play

It's interesting to watch how different markets, with seamingly very similar characteristics and dynamics, play out very differently. Personally, I believe that the independent pure play has an enormous influance on the early success or failure of these enterpise standardization efforts. It all boils down to motivations. The stack vendors are motivated to play a very different game. To them, vertical integration within their stack is their primary mission, because it's how they achieve differentiation, customer lock-in and maximize the value of each customer and deal. It leaves the 'intra-stack' interoperability a distant cousin to the priorities of their own integration requirements. I believe there is more lip service done to open standards by the larger players, especially interfaces that open the door to competing technologies, than real investment.  The niche pure play doesn't have these competing priorities, and thus can play a focused role on getting the standards across the chasm, whereby customer demand and momentum dictate that the standards-based interfaces be taken seriously.