Directory Services

The market for Directory Services (DS) has expanded considerably over the past three years.

• The previously so clear vision has become foggy: Directory Services are fusing with Meta and Virtual DS, integration tools without DS emerging. A borderline towards EAI is required
• Standards: the LDUP initiative is shipwrecked. It is unclear how, and if, this hole in server-to-server communication will be filled. Standards and protocols from the Web Services field dominate the development
• Directory enabled applications: Resource Provisioning applications have entered the marketplace as a logical extension of identity arid resource information, in order to process the necessary workflows. Complete user environments, like e.g. the mySAP infrastructure, become DS clients and, in connection with DS, offer comprehensive Identity Management functions
• Vendors reposition themselves; new vendors enter the market and some have merged

A different, immaterial (i.e. not material), development seems to be of particular consequence, however: a shift in perspective

• away from DS as isolated technical structural components, acquiring steadily increasing functionality but still seeking full appreciation as independent principal components of what is normally understood to be an enterprise structure
• towards regarding the process of Identity Management as a necessary administrative task in enterprises, without which e-business remains unsafe. Among the supporting components DS is probably the most important core component

This new orientation towards processes and thus the usefulness for individuals, and enterprises or other organisations, was overdue.

Three important inhibitors have so far been in the way of widespread acceptance and implementation of Directory Services.