Why idBUS?

The explosive growth of identity management technology over the past five years is a testament to the tremendous focus companies have placed on implementing identity solutions to meet the changing security and compliance landscape. Yet, many deployments achieve early success only to falter when application enablement becomes most critical.

idBUS provides the core framework of services necessary to meet integration challenges. idBUS enables rapid application integration (RAI) by drastically reducing the time, resources and costs associated with identity enablement. Using idBUS, and given common requirements, integration time can be by cut by up to 70%, with a reduction in authored code of up to 95%.

The idBUS Value Proposition

In short, idBUS provides organizations with the tools necessary to to maximize the effectiveness, adoption, and ROI of identity management investments. Some of the key advantages for companies that deploy idBUS include:

Benefits for architects

Robust service contract defined through XSD and WSDL
idBUS schemas can be fully customized to expose desired view of identities and entitlements
Advanced versioning for long-term extensibility
Service definition is cleanly separated from implementation
Infinitely flexible service chain processing
Straightforward extensibility mechanism for custom code and business logic
Consolidates business logic, domain logic, back-end service interfaces, and constraints for identity processing in a single place.

Benefits for service providers

Applications are completely insulated from changes to the identity infrastructure / topology
Developed to take full advantage of existing identity technologies like LDAP, Web SSO, provisioning services, Metadirectory, etc.
Designed to leverage other enterprise services like load balancers, SSL accelerators, XML firewalls, ESBs, etc.
Simple deployment on existing J2EE application server infrastructure as a standard WAR file
Designed for peak performance, even on modest hardware
Horizontal scalability model allows rapid growth to meet changing needs
Robust code base undergoes thorough testing to ensure stability

...integration time can be by cut by up to 70%, with a reduction in authored code of up to 95%...

Benefits for developers and integration teams

Interaction with idBUS occurs through native language constructs
All attributes of managed entities are exposed as JavaBean or .NET class properties
Standard based approach for tooling support - no handwritten XML, no complex APIs
All idBUS services are exposed as clearly named classes and methods
Early binding reduces need for separate schema documentation
Compiler enforced semantics eliminate runtime mapping problems and mis-keyed identifiers
Minimal configuration - an application only needs to know the idBUS WSDL endpoint to integrate with the system
No need to understand complex identity management technologies like LDAP, token based authentication, cryptography, provisioning...

Benefits for management

Keep identity services simple
Integrate many applications faster, with less code, and fewer resources
Reduce long term support costs
True P3 (platform, process, policy) standardization
Less documentation, shorter learning curve for integrators
Develop existing identity infrastructure into a mature, sustained service
Maximize economies of scale, reclaim ROI