Saturday, August 12, 2006
Federated Identity and Industry Conferences...
Do the so-called industry experts on federated identity actually have a clue?
Awhile back, I had the idea of putting together a conference for Digital ID World where I would have panelists from end-user companies that participate in federated identity consortiums would be panel members. The idea behind the panel was to eschew all the software vendors who would provide abstract stories about the real paying customers of this approach and get to the details of the story never told.
Unfortunately I was unsuccessful in this undertaking as I didn't have enough bandwidth to figure out who in Fortune 100 enterprises whose primary business wasn't technology that was actually thinking about it. Likewise in pinging many of the federated identity providers I discovered that the real truth is that many of them only have one or two at best customers doing anything meaningful.
In my quest I also reached out to several industry analyst firms and asked them the same question. Nothing came of it because they are even further away from the problem and haven't had direct conversation themselves. The funny thing is that there are many smart folks that are blogging on identity yet they all suffer from one problem. I wonder if folks such as Kim Cameron ever get to talk to real world customers and not just "internal" ones? I wonder if he has ever encouraged them to tell their own stories publicly? Actually I would ask the same question to Pat Patterson of Sun as to when was the last time he asked members of Project Liberty to start sharing pain points outside of the Project Liberty forum for others to consume and learn from?
Anyway, I have made this my 2007 goal to make another run at an industry conference to moderate a panel on this topic. If anyone knows of architects in Fortune 100 enterprises that would love to participate, please leave a comment. Likewise, if you are interested in meeting up, I will be attending Tech Forum in NYC on October 19th...
| | View blog reactionsAwhile back, I had the idea of putting together a conference for Digital ID World where I would have panelists from end-user companies that participate in federated identity consortiums would be panel members. The idea behind the panel was to eschew all the software vendors who would provide abstract stories about the real paying customers of this approach and get to the details of the story never told.
Unfortunately I was unsuccessful in this undertaking as I didn't have enough bandwidth to figure out who in Fortune 100 enterprises whose primary business wasn't technology that was actually thinking about it. Likewise in pinging many of the federated identity providers I discovered that the real truth is that many of them only have one or two at best customers doing anything meaningful.
In my quest I also reached out to several industry analyst firms and asked them the same question. Nothing came of it because they are even further away from the problem and haven't had direct conversation themselves. The funny thing is that there are many smart folks that are blogging on identity yet they all suffer from one problem. I wonder if folks such as Kim Cameron ever get to talk to real world customers and not just "internal" ones? I wonder if he has ever encouraged them to tell their own stories publicly? Actually I would ask the same question to Pat Patterson of Sun as to when was the last time he asked members of Project Liberty to start sharing pain points outside of the Project Liberty forum for others to consume and learn from?
Anyway, I have made this my 2007 goal to make another run at an industry conference to moderate a panel on this topic. If anyone knows of architects in Fortune 100 enterprises that would love to participate, please leave a comment. Likewise, if you are interested in meeting up, I will be attending Tech Forum in NYC on October 19th...
