Category Archives: announcements

The Game’s Afoot!

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After eight and a half years at Ping Identity, I am amazed to say that I’m moving on. I have had the privilege of working with incredibly talented people, from the CTO team to the product management team, to the entire field sales and technical corps.  I am so proud of what Ping has made in the last eight years and of the things that we have chosen to hold dear: quality software, long-term deep relationships with customers, and leadership in identity standards through practicing what we preach.  Also, serious costume parties 🤪

Some of my favorite PingIdentians

My other incredible windfall has been to meet brilliant and talented customer architects. They have taught me so much about the bigger picture, the reality that all the vision has to fit into, before it can resonate.

Last, I want to say something about the two people who were my direct superiors at Ping, Patrick Harding and Andre Durand.

Andre and Patrick (and costume parties)

Patrick and Andre took a chance on a relatively unknown Canadian identity geek, brought her onto the team and gave her support, autonomy, and opportunity.  I would not be the person I am without the mentorship and friendship of these two amazing people.  Thank you for believing in me.

Sometimes life surprises you – and I was recently surprised by an opportunity to really challenge myself in terms of growth and impact. So – onwards!  I am excited to say I am joining the Microsoft Identity team, working for Alex Simons as Director of Identity Standards. I can’t believe that I somehow get to work in the rarified air of this team, with some of the people I admire the most in Identity.  It took about 30 seconds of discussion with Alex to realize that this opportunity represented a chance to work with incredibly smart people, participate in complex problems that have to be solved at massive scale, and most importantly, to be able to advocate for standardized solutions to those problems, allowing for the whole industry to adopt secure patterns even if they don’t have the reach or resources of a company like Microsoft.

Anyone who knows me knows that getting to talk identity standards like OAuth & OpenID Connect all day every day is my idea of heaven; I can’t wait to see how the bits fit together for customers at the consumer and multi-tenant enterprise scale of MSFT.  What will the future hold for identity standards? I have a few strong opinions in this area, but there is a whole new world of perspective awaiting. I hope I can some part in defining that future, wherever we all end up.

Stay tuned, I hope to do a lot more writing here, now that I can really focus on driving industry conversation, and I can’t wait to work with everybody in my new role!

Wish me luck!

I will miss you all, stay in touch!

 

What a Team

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In case you hadn’t heard, Ping Identity just hired Travis Spencer to work with Paul Madsen, Patrick Harding and myself in the Office of the CTO.

Score!!!

We’ll all be meeting up in January for our first in-person strategy session, and I can’t wait!

OpenID Bound

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I’m really happy to report that today I join the board of directors of the OpenID Foundation, representing Ping Identity.  This is a big decision for us! It reflects not only our strategic conclusion that OpenID is a critical part of the ecosystem that will evolve in this new decade, but also our tactical roadmap, driven by our customers and their use cases.

From a personal perspective, I am excited to be able to more closely work with all the smart folks that I’ve been rubbing shoulders with for years and years at IIW, and to literally have time allocated in my week to focus both on OpenID technology and community tasks.  I believe 2010 will see renewal and acceleration in both consumer identity and enterprise identity: having a small part in that growth will be fascinating.

Check out the Ping Identity Press Release here.

New Gig!

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I am so tardy in writing this, tsk tsk…

I am now officially a Senior Technical Architect at Ping Identity.   All of you who know the Ping folks know that this will be an exhilarating ride.  I work for Patrick Harding in the Office of the CTO, and I can honestly say that this is one crazy learning curve!

Ping Identity

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Ping Identity, they do Internet Identity Security – SSO and token transformation using SAML, WS-Trust, WS-Federation, and whatever else is necessary to get the job done.  They also do federated provisioning, which of course is one of my passions. It’s a fun time to join; the current interest (dare I say mania?) around cloud computing is starting to resolve into common-sense questions around potential risk to the Enterprise caused by mis-management of cloud resources – and at least in my mind, I see these questions changing the adoption patterns for technologies like SAML from a early adopters and massive organizations to everyone’s organizations.  I’m also very excited to see what the addition of consumer identity protocols like OpenID and oAuth will do to adoption patterns.

From the employment front, it has been fascinating to have insight into the inner workings of a product company – I have always been on the customer side before this, and the change in perception is fascinating.  I think it must change some of what I write here – but change is good, I think.   The biggest challenge will be finding the time to write —  keeping up with these Ping folks is hard work, they are aggressive and agile, and they are focused, holy cow are they focused.  Er, we are focused.  I am we!  Woohoo!!!

Ok.  Gotta run.  Life at Ping is a sprint, and I’m loving the adrenaline high :)

Canadian IAM Community

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Are you a Canadian member of the identity or access management community?  In case you don’t know already, there are a number of new venues evolving to service this community, and I’m really excited to be a part of them!

  1. The CanadIAM Blog – this blog is dedicated to the Canadian take on Identity and Access  Management, thanks to the organizing efforts of Mike Waddingham over at Code Technology.  It’s just getting off the ground, but I think it will attract a very strong community — make sure you add it to your blog reader!
  2. The ICE Conference — this will be the very first Canadian tech conference that I’ve spoken at, I can’t wait to actually meet folks from my own backyard and compare notes and experiences!   The conference is in Edmonton on November 2-4, 2009 – the only sad thing is that it happens to conflict with the Internet Identity Workshop;  as a result I’ll have to split my time between the two rather than getting the full benefit of either, which is such a shame!IAM Canadian

It is great to see these kinds of resources evolving, and I think it speaks to the maturity and growth of I&AM practices in Canadian organizations.   I believe that the best way to be successful in many of these ventures is to share – and what better way than to do so than with a group of people who have strong common interests.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/michael40001/1828017204/

Leap of Faith

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It is official!

Friday was my last day as a Nulli Secundus employee.  After 7 great years, I am ready to strike out on my own!

I’ve created a company called Bonsai Identity, so named because I very strongly believe that the most successful way to manage identities is not to neglect them until the pain is acute and then try to hack them back into some semblance of order, but instead to pay attention along the way, and to make enlightened choices that shape the future of the organization in a positive way.

I am extremely fired up about the future, but before I wax poetic about all the things I can’t wait to do,  I want to say thanks to all of my coworkers at Nulli, and most of all to Derek and Barb, the owners.   I found my passion at Nulli, and was nurtured and encouraged to develop that passion at every step.   If I wasn’t absolutely sure that we will continue to cooperate and collaborate, I believe I would be heartbroken right now, but as it is, I feel ecstatic;  I am changing direction, but I am blessed to do so knowing that I have incredible mentorship and friendship nearby.

Thank you for seven great years of brilliant work with and for brilliant people.

OSIS Discusses OASIS IMI Spec

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Our next OSIS conference call will include an open discussion on the first OASIS information card specification, open for public review until the end of April – ISIP done growed up!

The discussion is open to everyone, and takes place during our regular weekly con-call slot at noon PST on Monday March 9, 2009 – you can either join the OSIS general list to get the call-in details or email your favorite OSIS member and ask them to forward on the details!

Hope to see you there, the more people with eyeballs on this, the happier we’ll all be in the end.

A PDF version of the spec is available here: http://docs.oasis-open.org/imi/identity/v1.0/cd/identity-1.0-spec-cd-02.pdf

To join the OSIS general list, send an email to:

osis-general-subscribe@lists.idcommons.net

Update:  if you are seeing ugly “pack” errors at the beginning of the RSS feed for my post, my apologies.  I’ve disabled recaptcha until I can diagnose the problem.