* Why you should attend identity management conferences
I was in Boston last week for Courion’s third annual Converge conference. This is best described as an annual user group meeting with lots of others in attendance. Customers and potential customers, partners and potential partners and a smattering of press and analysts, including Burton Group’s Mike Neuenschwander, Gartner’s Earl Perkins, and Digital ID World’s Phil Becker, all got together to hold conversations on provisioning, compliance, passwords/authentication and other identity management topics.
It’s something more companies ought to publicize, and invite potential customers and partners to. Adding in press/analysts who understand the identity management area is a plus that works both ways. The customers like to be able to talk to and question the “experts” while those of us who sometimes seem to pontificate can get a reality check on what implementing identity management in the real world is all about.
Sometimes I get a good story out of these sessions, like the tale from last year’s Converge event about self-service password reset (http://www.networkworld.com/newsletters/dir/2004/0607id1.html). Sometimes there’s no immediate story, just good background information and a touch of reality. The Courion conference is relatively small (perhaps 150 people in all) but that brings an intimacy that huge shows (Interop, for example) simply don’t have.
NetPro’s Directory Experts Conference, the Burton Group’s Catalyst event, Gartner’s IT Summits, Novell’s BrainShare, Microsoft’s TechEd, the RSA Conference – all are, or were started as, user/client events that have grown over the years. All seem to offer more in terms of intellectual content than the many “trade shows” (e.g., Comdex) that have come and gone over the years. I try to attend these types of user community events as often as I can. It isn’t always possible (two years in a row I’ve had to cancel a visit to Thor Technology’s user event – but I’ll try to make it again next year).
The Courion show is typical in its speaker lineup – company leaders (President and CEO Chris Zannetos, CTO Brian Milas), industry gurus (Gartner’s Perkins, Digital ID’s Becker), technology partners (Deloitte & Touche) and customers both large and small. It’s a good mix and gives a good picture of the state of identity management at a given point in time.
Lots of vendors in many different areas – not just identity management – have annual meetings like this. They’re very useful to customers but might even be more useful to potential customers – it’s an opportunity to talk to those who have already implemented the products and are very willing to share with you both the serendipitous occurrences as well as the potholes they’ve come across.
Small can often be better, at least in terms of content density. Come back next week (not next issue) and I’ll let you know what I discovered here at Converge.
