Attended Burton (now acquired by Gartner) Catalyst 2010 in San Diego, an excellent forum to get upto speed on what is happening in technology world in terms of standards and trends.
Paradigm shifts:
* Pushing core to the outside
* How SAAS, HIAS, PAAS, have provided capabilities to the industry in terms of scalability. Users pay only what they need. * Stop wasting platform resources by leveraging virtualization
* Chaning views on how Identities should be managed
* Writing applications that are cloud aware and are able to co-exist on a platform