John “JG” Chirapurath: JG here, from the identity and access team at Microsoft. As you probably remember, last year at RSA Conference USA, Microsoft announced availability of Identity Lifecycle Manager (ILM) 2007, which joined user provisioning and certificate & smartcard management in a single integrated offering. For far too long, the industry has treated two related functions – identity management & strong authentication – as fundamentally dissimilar things. This despite the fact that customers have stressed that they are not! Both functions are connected by Identity and its related workflows – the act of provisioning a user identity is deeply connected with issuing a certificate or a smartcard to that Identity. ILM 2007 sought to address this very need.

As I look back at last year, all of us here in the Microsoft identity & access group have been pleased and humbled by the reception of the approach and ILM 2007! Customers have repeatedly told us that we have the winning approach from a TCO perspective, and it allows them to maximize their existing investments in infrastructure – be it Microsoft Windows or other heterogeneous systems.