News

SPML: Ready for prime time?

• By Rich Seeley
• July 9, 2003

Sun Microsystems, PeopleSoft and Waveset Technologies Inc. believe the OASIS Service Provisioning Markup Language (SPML) is ready for prime time, and this week disclosed plans to jointly demonstrate an SPML application tomorrow at the Burton Group's Catalyst Conference 2003 in San Francisco.

The integrated Sun, Waveset, PeopleSoft product is designed to bridge the gap between human resources and IT by combining processes such as adding new employees to an HR system and simultaneously providing them access to corporate computer systems, Michael D'Eath, vice president of corporate and business development at Waveset, told XML Report.

The demonstration at Catalyst links Waveset's Lighthouse environment for identity management and provisioning with the SunONE identity server and directory server, as well as with PeopleSoft's HCM (human capital management) environment, he said.

"The integration we'll be showing on Thursday revolves around the ability to work from within the PeopleSoft HCM environment to add a new employee," D'Eath said. "Through the SPML standard, that request is picked up by Waveset Lighthouse, inspected by our system based on business rules, and acted upon for provisioning that user into the Sun identity server and directory server."

Asked about the maturity of SPML, which is in the final stages of the OASIS approval process, he said, Waveset has been using it at customer sites for business applications since the first of this year.

Glenn Sulzberg, PeopleSoft's director of product management, noted that SPML comes from good stock. "It's really a derivative of DSML," Sulzberg said, referring to the OASIS Directory Services Markup Language. "So you're taking a standard that's being used by industry and moving it into a new realm for service provisioning."

Manish Bhuptani, director of network services at Sun, noted that his company has been a driving force in the SPML effort. He said Sun believes that SPML can provide huge gains in interoperability for customers.

The Sun, PeopleSoft, Waveset bundle demonstrated this week is slated to ship next month, officials said.

In other news at the conference, IBM, Microsoft, BEA Systems, RSA Security and VeriSign disclosed the publication of WS-Federation, a standard set of specifications that developers can use to add security capabilities to Web services.

"The WS-Federation specification defines mechanisms to allow developers to manage and establish trust relationships across companies and domains that are using different types of security solutions, including support for federated identities," the announcement said. Federated identities are defined as "the exchange of identity information between systems, such as the security clearance level or name of the user or Web service."