The Year of Virtual Directory?

I have blogged quite a bit on the value of Virtual Directory technology in directory services infrastructure. I was pleasantly surprised yesterday while attending a Burton group webinar titled VantagePoint 2008: The End of Command and Control is Near (you must be a client for access). The fifth and final agenda item was Trends for Directory Services in which the speaker focused almost entirely on the evolution toward (and value of) virtualization of identity information. That is, virtualizing the data structure, access protocols, server locations, etc. and presenting the same useful data from its original source in real time (or cached) in virtually any format and over most common data interfaces. It's nothing new to long-time readers of this blog, but seeing it as the center of the Trends section in Burton's webinar probably means that customers are telling them that Virtual Directory is moving up the prioritization ladder. That's a good thing -- it means Virtual Directory vendors will be able to continue to invest in this very cool technology and implementation teams have a better chance of getting this very useful tool to leverage in their bag of tricks.