The biggest announcement to come out of the recent Internet Identity Workshop didn’t have anything to do with protocols or IDM, except tangentially. The big news is that Craig Burton is back.
Burton was involved in Identity and networking even before I was — and you all know I helped authenticate the dinosaurs.
Craig was one of the first employees of Novell Systems in the early 1980s, being named VP of marketing in 1984. In his book “Surfing the High Tech Wave,” Roger White says of Burton: “Craig proved an exceptionally good planner and articulate spokesman for the open systems marketing and technology approach.” White credits Burton and his future wife, Judith Clarke, with creating the powerhouse that Novell was in the late 1980s.
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After falling out with mercurial CEO Ray Noorda, Burton (and Judith) left the company in 1989.
Craig immediately launched The Burton Report, a monthly subscription-based research magazine which was published by The Burton Group. In time, the Group, with its analysis and direction, became the premiere source of information about all things Identity. Craig retired from the group in 1997, and it was sold to The Gartner Group last year.
Burton faded from sight while he cared for his ailing parents and did some private consulting, but in the past few years — pushed and prodded by Doc Searls, Phil Windley and others involved with IIW — he looked into the user-centric identity market and got hooked on identity again.
Lately he’s been focused on the “Internet of Things” — an area he’ll further explore in his latest gig (see “Bringing the Web to Life at Last“). You see, Craig has just signed on with Kuppinger Cole, the noted European analysts who have just opened U.S. offices in Boston. Tim Cole, Kuppinger-Cole founder and the man heading up the U.S. operation, said that Burton will “… act as a kind of point man in North America where he has close ties with almost everyone who has anything important to say within the Identity Community.”
Burton will have the title “Distinguished Analyst,” and I can’t think of anyone else more deserving of that moniker.
