* Reports from Digital ID World and Mobile ID Services conference
Last week was a busy one for me – Monday and Wednesday at Digital ID World in Denver, and Tuesday at the Mobile ID Services conference in San Francisco. At least I wasn’t alone in crossing the Rockies multiple times in just a few hours.
Sara Gates, Sun’s vice president of identity management; Venkat Raghavan, IBM’s Tivoli security product manager; Archie Reed, HP’s director of strategy for identity and access management; and Ranjeet Vidwans, Thor Technologies’ director of product management, also made the trek between the two venues. Many of them do this sort of thing all the time. I don’t see how they keep up the pace yet seem always eager to pause and talk about whatever inane (or, sometimes, “nane”) idea I might have.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll bring up some of those ideas (hopefully just the “nane” ones) that dominated conversations over coffee and other beverages at the shows. Today, though, I want to briefly recap the news announcements you may have seen, which could be considered important.
Getting buzz at both shows was Neustar’s introduction of Identity Services eXchange, which allows wireline and wireless service providers to deliver a new class of subscriber services based on secure, private identity-based information. For more details, go to https://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/041025/nym121_1.html .
Ping ID, known to most of you as an indefatigable supporter of standards groups, open source and free downloads (through its hosting and sponsorship of http://www.sourceid.org), looks to finally be making money with a product. It announced a partnership with IBM-Tivoli to provide its federation technology to users of Tivoli’s identity and access management products. For more details, go to: https://www.pingidentity.com/index.php?cid=news&tid=26 .
Courion and Deloitte & Touche announced a strategic alliance that will expand the identity management services offered by Deloitte & Touche. The relationship might be described as more than friendship and less than an engagement. They’ll be dating “semi-exclusively” according to Courion Marketing Vice President Deb Pappas. For more information, go to: https://www.courion.com/news/releases/2004/Deloitte_Alliance_pr2004.asp?lid=Deloitte_Alliance_News&lpos=right .
Digital Evolution, a company new to me, was the first to announce integration of its Web services security and management software with the latest version of Netegrity’s SiteMinder, along with other identity-based access management systems. For more information, go to: https://www.digev.com/index.php/section/company_press_detail/digital_evolution_first_to_integrate_with_latest_identity_management_platfo/ .
I’ll get back to Digital Evolution and some of the other new (or new to me) companies that I talked to last week, including SpotMeeting, mIdentity, Encentuate and more, as well as some old friends – Sun, Thor Technologies, IBM, Novell, HP, Abridean, PingID and the Liberty Alliance. The Liberty Alliance recently introduced a new full-time, executive director. Next issue, I want to offer some suggestions and speculations touched off by something I heard Mark Ford, a principal in the Secure e-Business group of Deloitte & Touche’s Enterprise Risk Services, say while we were discussing the Courion-D&T announcement.
