Posted 9:05 AM (0) comments

Burtner or Garton?

Huge news this morning as it was announced that Gartner had purchased the Burton Group in a straight cash transaction (reportedly $56 million). WTF?

These are groups addressing two different constituencies. As the Wall Street Journal reported: "Gartner has typically focused on advising companies' chief information officers and senior IT executives, while Burton has built its business by advising 'front-line IT professionals,' said Gartner Chief Executive Gene Hall."

Even though I don't always see eye-to-eye with the Burton Analysts, I consideer them to be the finest group of minds available on IdM questions. Bob Blakley, Gerry Gebel, Ian Glazer, Kevin Kampman, Lori Rowland, and Mark Diodati are an Identity brain trust , almost a national treasure. Add in the brilliant minds of Phil Shacter, Dan Blum and - of course - Jamie Lewis and you have an irreplaceable resource.

Gartner also has some good minds in IdM, just not as many. I could easily sit and chat with Earl Perkins all day, for example. But Gartner's IdM practice isn't something I want to listen to. As I said last year, about Gartner's IdM Summit: "It isn’t a conference that you, the identity management expert, should go to – at least not alone. This is really geared more to the line-of-business (LOB) manager who needs to get a handle on this 'identity stuff'.” And Perkins agreed with me.

This acquisition could put Gartner in the forefront of IdM thinking, or end up with all of Burton's heavy hitters on the back burner. Time will tell.

Labels: acquisition, Burton, Gartner

Posted 9:43 AM (0) comments

Tell us what you really feel...

In an Open Letter to Steve Ballmer, Craig Burton rants about the ridiculous policy Microsoft has for controlling updates and enhancements:

As we drove further down to path to understand why, we were told the following unbelievable conversation. (The following is not an exact quote, but close.)

Changes like you are requesting can only happen in an “in-band” release of Windows. These sort of changes are prohibited from going out in the Tuesday updates. What goes out with in-band releases the Tuesday updates is controlled by—Steve Ballmer.

Well F*&% me. Dude, after all of these years, you are still micro managing the Windows release! Now I know why Microsoft is now been relegated to insignificance in the identity market. The reason is simple. Internal policy, managed by you, prohibits product mangers from keeping up with trends and innovation.

And what was the momentous change Burton was asking about?

In our meeting, we discussed how many man hours it would take to modify CardSpace to support context-automation. The answer is a few days of work at the most. When asked how long before such a simple change would find its way into CardSpace, the answer came back as two years at best, maybe.

Unfortunately, Ballmer has never understood the importance of identity to the fabric of computing, so he's never going to permit what he would perceive as "feature creep" in the regular monthly updates. That's good news for Microsoft's competitors, and bad news for it's customers.

Labels: Burton, cardspace, metasystem, Microsoft, rant

Posted 8:55 AM (1) comments

The blind philosophes of Identity

Kim has now responded ("Through the looking glass") to my Humpty Dumpty post, and we're beginning to sound like a couple of old philosophes arguing about whether or not to include "le weekend" and "hamburguer" and other Franglais in the French dictionary.

We really aren't that far apart.

In his post, Kim recalls launching the name "metadirectory" back in '95 with Craig Burton and I certainly don't dispute that. In fact, up until 1999, I even agreed somewhat with his definition:

"In my world, a metadirectory is one that holds metadata - not actual objects, but descriptions of objects and their locations in other physical directories."

But as I continued in that Network World column:

"Unfortunately, vendors such as Zoomit took the term 'metadirectory' and redefined it so it could be used to describe what I'd call an überdirectory - a directory that gathers and holds all the data from all your other directories."

Since no one took up my use of "uberdirectory," we started using "metadirectory" to describe the situations which required a new identity store and "virtual directory" for those that didn't.

So perhaps we're just another couple of blind men trying to describe an elephant.

Labels: Burton, identity, metadirectory, virtual directory

Posted 9:12 AM (2) comments

PKI, PKU, PK-HeSheIt

Gerry Goebel has a good, short story illustrating why PKI has never caught on, and never will.

Labels: Burton, PKI, security