Gluu Inc., a leader in open source cloud identity, today announced a strategic partnership with the shibboleth sso Consortium to help fund continuing development and marketing of Shibboleth open source software. The partnership agreement will add a suggested donation of $1,200 to the sale of all Gluu EDU Servers.

“Shibboleth provides one of the most advanced SAML platforms on the market, and it’s in production at thousands of universities and public institutions. When we heard the consortium needed additional funding to continue development, we wanted to help,” said Gluu CEO, Michael Schwartz. “No other SAML platform supports the multi-party federation or granular attribute release policies that Gluu’s customers expect. Many existing business relationships have been implemented using SAML. Despite newer standards, SAML will be with us for a long time, and its important that we help fund one of the most important global open source SAML projects.”

This funding will help ensure that the Shibboleth development team is engaged to address any identified security vulnerabilities. Another effort is to support adoption of the technology by offering services that help organizations test their SAML service. The Shibboleth Foundation hosts a reliable web service to enable institutions and websites to test SAML entities before deploying in a production environment. 5,800 organizations have registered to use this service since 2006.

“In order to continue our important work, we needed to increase the number of funded developer hours for the project,” said Nicole Harris, Shibboleth Consortium Manager. “We appreciate Gluu answering the call for assistance. We are encouraged that new open source business models are emerging to help align the Foundation’s funding of Shibboleth in the identity software market. We are also excited to spread the word about platforms like Gluu which use Shibboleth to provide more options to organizations that want to launch a SAML identity federation single sign on to manage trust with their partners.”

The Gluu EDU cloud Identity platform is currently used by 10 US universities. Visit Gluu EDU for more information on pricing and features,

About Gluu:

Gluu is an Austin, TX startup that provides open source and on demand cloud identity and trust management. Gluu leverages standards such as OpenID Connect, SAML 2.0, and SCIM to make achieving active directory single sign on secure and easy. Deployed quickly on public and private cloud servers, Gluu’s On Demand cloud identity platform addresses the installation and operational issues of an organizational identity provider at one predictably low annual cost.

About the Shibboleth Consortium:

The Shibboleth Consortium has been established to provide a mechanism for deployers of Shibboleth worldwide to make financial contributions to the Shibboleth project. The Consortium is intended to be a lightweight support function for the Shibboleth project, providing financial, administrative and governance support.

After a decade of creating a multitude of online accounts, with a plethora of usernames and passwords, most people will welcome some form of identity consolidation. cas single sign on will whittle that down to just one, allowing you to use your email address to identify yourself online and to authenticate.

OpenID Connect 1.0 is a profile of OAUTH 2.0, an IETF Internet Draft. The OpenID Foundation Members include Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. This group collectively serves a critical mass of American consumers, and if they support one method of authentication, there will be an overwhelming advantage for web sites to adopt it.

By using your email to identify yourself on the web, OpenID Connect 1.0 will enable web sites to send a request to your domain to confirm that you are authenticated. It also defines how to grant access to certain resources, such as your profile or your list of friends. The standard is a win-win for consumers and web sites.

OpenID Connect has the potential to be one of the pillars that will enable the NSTIC vision to realize a safer Internet for consumers. With fewer web-based accounts to manage, consumers will have an incentive to invest in stronger authentication technologies, and there will be fewer passwords on the Internet for hackers to steal.

I like to compare the first version of OpenID to the Vikings. The Vikings were able to cross the North Atlantic 600 years before other Europeans, but made no permanent settlements in North America. In 2005, the first version of OpenID was the Viking of consumer federated identity: it was groundbreaking, but other than a few abandoned campsites, there is not much sign of it left. After seven years, this latest version, OpenID Connect 1.0, is poised to put down roots. Both the user experience and the security have been vetted by technologists at the web’s leading consumer identity providers. In fact, OpenID Connect borrows aspects of the user experience from Facebook Connect while also defining several other related standards to make the solution more comprehensive.

How to Prepare

If your organization provides users with an email account, you will probably want to launch (1) an idp saml Provider (“OP”) where people at your organizations can authenticate and (2) launch an OpenID Connect discovery service, so Internet web sites can “validate” your users. If you are a web site, you should consider adding support for OpenID Connect 1.0 into your release roadmap. The good news for web sites is that OpenID Connect is relatively lightweight; uses JSON, REST and all that stuff; and there are client libraries out there in Java, Python and other popular programming platforms.

Organizations have a number of options to support OpenID Connect: using open source software, buying commercial software and using cloud service providers. I am proud to announce this week the launch of a new Gluu Cloud Identity Server, which leverages the OpenStack Compute API to just-in-time provision Rackspace Cloud Servers. With OpenID Connect, the availability of an organization’s authentication and authorization service becomes increasingly critical. The design of Gluu’s service around OpenStack enables us to leverage Rackspace’s network to launch a highly robust organizational identity service. Gluu also makes its OpenID Connect software available forfree as part of the OX project. But whatever your OpenID Connect deployment strategy, I think one thing is for sure: the tide of Internet identity is changing, and those businesses that position themselves correctly will be in a position to be lifted by it.