* So many venues for identity talk
Another Digital ID World has come and gone (this was the sixth annual event) and while much was familiar there was a different feel to the event. It was as if you were visiting old friends but in their new house. The furniture was recognizable, but the arrangement was quite different. It was last year that Digital ID World impresario Phil Becker decided that the logistics of show management were getting to be just too much for him. Or, more likely, for his delightful wife Kathie. So he made a deal with IDG.
IDG does put on a lot of shows, so it’s understandable that there would be some “economies of scale” making them at least similar if not identical. There were some new and different vendors, some new features (meals within the trade show area) some missing features (the pre-show reception) and some different features (electronic surveys for the sessions). The one thing that didn’t change, though, was the content. That was still firmly controlled by Phil and his sidekick, Eric Norlin. Lots of real world experience presented to an enthusiastic audience with plenty of interaction. The speaker’s platform isn’t dominated by vendors or “talking heads,” but by people on the front lines of the identity battles. May it always be that way.
In talking with people at the show, the thought that there are so many venues for identity these days came up. Digital ID World, of course. Catalyst and the RSA Conference (both the U.S. and European events) and now, OracleWorld. Even LinuxWorld is beginning to have an identity track. There’s the Gartner ID summit and the European Identity Conference.
There’s also the smaller, more targeted, shows such as NetPro’s Directory Experts Conference, the Marcus Evans events in the Asia-Pacific region as well as other regional events – or industry-specific events – throughout the U.S., the U.K., Europe and Asia. Finally, there are the “user group” style events – Courion’s has grown into a mini-trade show. I know I have trouble deciding which shows I’ll go to, what do you do? Unless you’re a vendor it’s likely you don’t have the travel budget to hit them all. So which shows do you try to get to, which do you wish you could get to and (for bonus credit) which do you avoid? Drop me a note at the address below and I’ll tabulate the results.
Probably the biggest news out of Digital ID World this year was the announcement by Orange, the mobile carrier arm of France Telecom, to adopt the OpenID registration/identification standard for its 40 million-plus subscribers. This is the first move by a mobile carrier into the OpenID space and simply reflects an undercurrent to the conversations at the show last week – mobile identity is the Next Big Thing. There’s still a lot of jockeying for position and a search for the “killer app” for mobile identity (the consensus I heard, though, was more along the lines of a “killer service”) but the mobile space is quite likely the next frontier, one we’ll explore in more depth before the year is out.
Upcoming events from the IdM Journal calendar:
Four interesting webinars are scheduled next week; at least one should be interesting to each of you –
* Oct. 9: A More Effective Approach to Securing Sensitive Enterprise DataService-based Identity and Access ManagementDeploying Macs in the EnterpriseSecurity Design Patterns Using WS-Trust
* Oct. 9:
* Oct. 9:
* Oct. 11:
