OpenSSO Express on IdentityBuzz

Sun announced an interesting support offering this morning with their OpenSSO Express offering. Boiled down it means companies can buy support for the OpenSSO offering, released on (about) three month cycles, instead of only being able to buy support for the “commercialized” version of OpenSSO, Access Manager (released around 12 month cycles).

What’s the deal there? The idea is that companies can quicker access to new features in the OpenSSO build rather than waiting for the longer, full cycle. As a Sun watcher, I like this kind of thing because it’s a simple, straight forward implementation, if you will, of being an open source company. Developers are typically prone to download and start using open source components for projects, esp. small, “just trying this out, ooops, now it’s a big deal for us” types of projects. Providing support for scenarios like that – starting to use OpenSSO instead of Access Manager – is nice for both developers and operations people who have to support the end result.

We talk about this more in-depth on the latest episode of the Sun IdentityBuzz – as well as the usual brain-dump on what we’ve been thinking about and seeing in identity-land. And, you’ll notice that Daniel Raskin (the smoking monkey!) has taken over hosting the IdentityBuzz from Brandon Whichard (who’s now at Zenoss).

You can download the audio directly here, or subscribe to the podcast feed.