* IDG World Expo now handling the logistics of Digital ID World
There’s big news on the trade show front. Now that’s a sentence I never thought I’d write in the Identity Management newsletter, but evidently identity managed to finally have a “breakout” year last year and be prominent on everybody’s radar this year.
Digital ID World (DIDW), held annually since 2002, has grown so big so fast that the original organizing team can no longer handle the logistics of bringing the audience and vendors together. Frequently when that happens, the organizers will sell out, pocket the cash and watch as the show loses focus only to trail off into oblivion (Comdex comes to mind). Phil Becker didn’t want that to happen to his “baby.” After all, Becker had come out of retirement (he retired early. Really!) to start DIDW and had made commitments to people that he was in it for the long term. Becker is a man of strong convictions, so selling out now was simply not something he could do and still face himself in the morning.
The problem was that Becker and his wife Kathi were spending 360 days a year getting ready for a three-day conference. (He did take a day off for emergency surgery last June, but was working away in his hospital bed the next day.) In chats I had with Becker at this summer’s Catalyst conference, he admitted that the logistical work was taking too much time and energy and he needed to find some way to offload it – either to hire more people to do it (expensive) or to sell off the show (heart-wrenching). But in true Becker-esque fashion, he found a third way.
The third way was to make an agreement with an organization that has made a business out of handling the logistics for interesting trade events, IDG World Expo. (Disclaimer: IDG World Expo is a business unit of IDG, which publishes – among more than 300 magazines and newspapers – Network World which, in turn, publishes this newsletter.)
IDG World Expo will handle the DIDW logistics: the bringing together of the audience and vendors. Becker and his advisors will then be able to concentrate on organizing the strategy, developing the conference content and communicating with the identity industry leaders about the direction of the event. It sounds like a win-win situation to me. I’m excited about next spring’s event, which will be the first fruit of this agreement.
If you’ve never been to a Digital ID World event, by the way, you don’t have to wait until next spring. This fall will be the first Digital ID World “Identity in Financial Services Summit” to be held Nov. 9-10 at the Millennium Broadway Hotel in New York City. This isn’t a show just for bean counters, by the way, as topics will include:
* How identity technology can help fight ID fraud and phishing.
* Provisioning, acquisitions and retaining agility.
* How federated identity works in practice.
* The considerations of deploying strong authentication.
* Preserving flexibility when using roles.
* Achieving directory agility across administrative domains.
There’s a little something for everybody in the ID business. I’ll be there, and perhaps you should be also. If you do go, find Phil Becker and tell him he did the right thing by outsourcing the logistics while staying involved with the content.
