Capabilities/Discovery

Connect Once, Discover an Ecosystem

Two parties can't interact until they find each other and work out how to connect. Raidiam Discovery is the capability that lets participants, applications and AI agents find services across an ecosystem dynamically, instead of building a separate integration for every relationship.

The Problem

Two machines need to interact

Before two systems can exchange data, one has to find the other, confirm what it offers, and work out how to connect securely. This applies equally to an organisation integrating with a partner, an application calling a service, or an AI agent acting on someone’s behalf.

The provider side matters just as much: whoever receives the request needs to know who is asking, what they want, and whether they’re entitled to it.

Every Connection

The questions every interaction has to answer

Every connection between two parties depends on answering four questions: who are you, what do you provide, where do I find it, and how do I connect. A provider answers the same four questions in reverse.

Who are you?

An identity the other party can trust.

What do you provide?

The services or data on offer.

Where do I find it?

The endpoint to connect to.

How do I connect?

The mechanism for reaching it securely.

Why Bilateral Fails

Doing this bilaterally doesn't scale

Bilateral integration, where every pair of participants exchanges and independently maintains information about each other, gets more expensive with every participant added, not less. It’s workable for one relationship and increasingly unworkable as an ecosystem grows.

Every new participant means repeating the same exchange. Every change on either side, a new endpoint, a rotated key, an updated service, means updating everyone who depends on that information. The cost isn’t the first handshake; it’s keeping accuracy across a growing number of bilateral relationships as things change.

That maintenance burden is what slows ecosystems down. If joining a new participant or launching a new service means another manual exchange, growth stalls.

Ready to remove the integration overhead from every new connection?

The Raidiam Approach

How Raidiam makes ecosystem information discoverable and resolvable

Raidiam replaces bilateral exchange with a single, shared, machine-readable source of truth that any participant can resolve on demand. Participants publish who they are, what they offer and how to connect once; the rest of the ecosystem discovers and resolves that information directly, without a separate agreement per relationship.

When something changes, it’s updated in one place and resolved fresh by whoever needs it, not pushed out and reconciled across every relationship individually.

Under the Hood

How this works, technically

Raidiam combines OpenID Federation with administration and additional APIs to provide a common way to discover participants, services and how to connect to them.

OpenID Federation

A standards-based mechanism for dynamically resolving trusted information about entities across the ecosystem.

Raidiam APIs

The management and additional query capabilities around that model, maintaining participants and their associated information, and accessing ecosystem information directly where required.

The Outcome

Together, these give participants a common way to find who and what exists, where services are available and how to connect, without establishing and maintaining that information separately for every relationship.

Beyond Discovery

What happens next

Discovery establishes who a provider is, what they offer and how to reach them, it doesn't by itself create a secure or authorised connection. That still requires establishing identity, authenticating, requesting access, and applying authorisation and policy.

Discover
Establish identity
Authenticate
Access
Authorise
Capability Series

Related capabilities

Identity

Coming soon

Establishing verifiable, resolvable identity for participants, applications and agents.

Authentication

Coming soon

Proving that identity at the point of connection, without shared secrets or bilateral setup.

Authorisation

Coming soon

Applying consent and policy to determine what an authenticated party can actually do.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

See Discovery in your ecosystem

Talk to us about mapping your participants and services into a single resolvable source of truth, or go straight to the API reference.