Bill Gates' keynote yesterday at the RSA Conference was his last. He is handing over to chief research and strategy officer, Craig Mundie, with whom he shared the stage yesterday. Gates marked his departure with a couple of significant identity-related announcements: one primarily focussed at the consumer, the other at the enterprise.

The first concerned a collaboration with the OpenID community, which has been comprehensively and effectively covered by those involved, including Microsoft's Kim Cameron, NetMesh's Johannes Ernst, SXIP's Dick Hardt, JanRain's Scott Kveton as well as OpenID's inventor, Six Apart's Brad Fitzpatrick. In a nutshell, the collaboration focusses on harnessing the benefits of both technologies, allowing individuals to control their own identity through the use of OpenID whilst exploiting the anti-phishing benefits of the CardSpace identity selector technology. The announcement doesn't come as a total surprise since there has been some fairly intensive and constructive debate regarding OpenID and anti-phishing with some valuable contributions from Kim Cameron regarding how CardSpace could help out. I do wonder when and if the Liberty Alliance will join the party.

The second announcement concerned ILM. No, not Information Lifecycle Management - Identity Lifecycle Manager. Microsoft announced the planned availability in May this year of its identity data synchronisation, user provisioning and credential management offering, building on the capabilities of Microsoft Identity Integration Server (based on technology acquired - together with Kim Cameron - from Zoomit). The announcement came as a bit of a surprise to me but is much needed in Microsoft's portfolio of identity management offerings. ILM is pretty comprehensive and will appeal particularly to organisations for whom Active Directory is a key identity data repository. That being said, Microsoft also plans to support directories from the likes of IBM, Novell and Sun (as well as mainframe security systems from IBM and CA and SAP business applications - but somewhat surprisingly Microsoft Dynamics is not listed!). Identity lifecycle and credential management are important capabilities but, as we discuss in our model for assessing vendors' identity management offerings, they are a subset of what is required if organisations are to maximise the business value of their identity management initiatives. It is therefore important that Microsoft extends its positioning of ILM to explain how it fits with its other identity management capabilities. Organisations considering ILM should therefore seek clarification from Microsoft how it fits with its other identity management solutions, as well as those from other vendors.

So although did not go out with a big bang, Gates did leave the RSA audience with something tangible.