Context in identity

Today I want to talk about a company I mentioned a year ago, with all intentions of telling you more about them. But even as I try to get them into today's newsletter, there's a timely issue to tell you about first, especially if you're in Munich this week for the 2nd annual European Identity Conference.

If you are here in Munich, be sure to come by our three hour long session Wednesday afternoon on Context in Identity, as well as my opening “Putting Identity in Context” talk that morning. But just in the last couple of weeks the “aha” guy of this conference, Kuppinger-Cole’s Joerg Resch, has put together a dynamite panel for Thursday morning – I’ll be moderating while host Martin Kuppinger, Quest VP Jackson Shaw (ex-Microsoft), Symlabs co-founder Sampo Kellomaki, Radiant Logic CEO Michel Prompt and the Bandit Project’s (and Novell’s) Dale Olds talk about “Virtual Directories and Beyond.” Each of the participants have been deeply involved in virtual directory technology – Sampo and Michel created their companies’ virtual directory products, Jackson was formerly VP at Zoomit who’s VIA product became the Microsoft Metadirectory Service, and Dale has worked on both Novell’s virtual directory as well as the Bandit Project. Martin and I simply like to talk about virtual directories!

This session grew from Dale’s blog post “Meta/Virtual/Directory Hubs and the Need for the Identity Bus”, which ultimately traces back to a previous newsletter ("Is the metadirectory dead?" ) prompted by a comment Jackson Shaw made. And, while neither Martin nor Sampo posted anything directly on that topic, Felix Gaehgens did and he’s a former VP of Symlabs now at Kuppinger-Cole so he can cover for both of them.

It’ll be a fascinating discussion of not only the future of virtual technology, “identity as a service,” the need for (and the tools for) data synchronization, but also to see what some of the brightest minds in the identity world are thinking about for that future. (Compare Identity Management products)

The session will be on Thursday, from 11:30 to 12:30, and should be a “must see” for anyone at the conference. For those who can’t be there, I’m sure I’ll be re-capping the salient points in the weeks to come.

And now to get to that company I've been meaning to talk about for the past year. It’s – what? We’re out of space? Okay, until next time when I really will tell you about one of the granddaddies of the governance, risk and compliance sector of the IdM space. One that’s making a major announcement this week. So be sure to stay tuned!