More on Higgins

My thanks to Pete Rowley for sharing insights on Higgins.  Based on his post I have furthered my understanding but I still don’t know if the answer is Yes or No  

Higgins seems to be an elephant (in the sense of the 3 blind men).  It depends on your perspective – identity provider, service provider, or infrastructure provider.   The identity provider can plug in any number of capabilities/protocols, the service provider can leverage from the identity pool with common APIs (just give me the identity stuff!), and the infrastructure can easily stitch a variety of identity services together both internally and across federations.  This is good.  The beauty is a well-defined, componentized framework for plugging all these pieces together.

Now, back to the question.  What is the difference between Higgins and a virtual directory?  I think Pete is suggesting they are similar but Higgins may be better componentized, structured, comprehensive and open relative to your classic virtual directory.  I am sure the virtual directory vendors will throw rocks at this.  In defense of the virtual directory vendors, I still don’t see any fundamental capability that Higgins provides that cannot also be delivered by a virtual directory.

Just so you don’t think I don’t have a position.  Higgins is helping to define the architecture of the identity meta-system.  Virtual directories will adapt (note that Novell is engaged with Higgins), but Higgins is a leader defining the new identity frontier.

Mike