In a recent podcast, Sun's senior product line manager for access and federation management Daniel Raskin and RedMonk's Michael Cote and Sun's Brandon Whichard explain federation ("extended enterprise, internally and externally") with examples and a new way to federate with partners: with Fedlets in the upcoming Sun Federated Access Manager. The benefits: simplicity, speed, lightweight, scalability, seamlessness, repeatability. Stay tuned for a vodcast demo.

For more background, have a look at a recent SDN article on an interview with Daniel.