Getting the band together again

Thor Technologies was an early pioneer in the provisioning field before being gobbled up by Oracle as one of their first moves into the IdM space. They garnered a mention here back in 2003 in a Catalyst Conference wrap-up, then got an issue devoted to them in 2004 (“Thor takes a stab at best of breed provisioning“), with a number of others to follow up to the company’s acquisition by Oracle in late 2005. Most of Thor’s people went to Oracle, then gradually drifted away over time.

BACKGROUND: Oracle buys ID, access-management companies

But just this week, three of the folks I talked to for that 2004 piece have finally reunited.

Ranjeet Vidwans (Thor’s product manager) joined Identropy as VP of sales and business development late last year.

Liz Safran (Thor’s PR artiste extraordinaire) joined him there early this year.

They’ve now convinced Nishant Kaushik (Thor product architect) to join up with them as chief architect. Anyone who follows his blog, Talking Identity, or has sat in on one of his sessions at an industry conclave (such as his keynote, “When Trust is not Enough,” at this year’s European Identity Conference) knows that this is a man who really eats and sleeps identity (well, except when he wastes his time rooting for any professional sports team with “New York” in its name).

When I spoke to Nishant about why he left Oracle to go to Identropy, he said:

“[T]he thing that impressed me the most about this team was their almost fanatical devotion to customer satisfaction. They really want to make identity management work for their customers instead of having their customers work on identity management. That ethos is what made the idea of working there very attractive to me, and which will drive the service offerings in SCUID [Secure Co-Sourced Unified Identity] we will be working on. There is a huge segment of the market for whom IdM is still a burden, and we’re really committed to changing that.”

I’ll be telling you more about SCUID in the weeks to come, but you can take a look at it now because it could be a game changer.