ABOUT THE SPEAKER Sekhar Sarukkai is currently a technical architect at Oblix. He was the original founder and CTO of Confluent Software, a leading Web services management company, which was acquired by Oblix in 2004. He holds a PhD in computer science from Indiana University. SESSION DESCRIPTION The mainstreaming of SOAs requires a more general approach to the notion of identities - beyond simply central management of people identities and into the realm of managing applications, devices, and other identities that represent entities that are first-class participants in this application network while also providing this as a pluggable service into the larger enterprise SOA. Enterprises should view identity as a service that is ubiquitously available and is a shared infrastructure service necessary for application networking, rather than as being managed by a server, such as an Authentication or Access server. While it makes architectural sense to consider an Identity service, there are business and related drivers that may force the need to deploy such an architecture.