Interesting advice from a security/identity outsider. A lot of his points are covered with solutions in the market today (user provisioning, privilege user management, etc…) Nonetheless, rather refreshing.

Most recently Mr. Merchant served as executive vice president, chief information officer and member of the executive committee at Fannie Mae. Prior to this, Mr. Merchant served as the chief technology officer at Merrill Lynch.

CIO’s have switched from “no way,” to talking feature sets when the subject of the cloud is brought up.

You could certainly use SPML to transmit the name ID from the IdP to the SP, since the name ID is just a fragment of XML that can travel in a SPML <data> element