Posted 9:44 AM (1) comments

The dearth of blogging

I'm skipping the first couple of days (the "workshop" days) at this year's Catalyst Conference in San Diego. In the past, I'd relied on others blogs for the nitty-gritty of what's going on in those sessions. This year, though, it appears that Twitter has become the reporting tool of choice (and yeoman work is being done by @paulmadsen, @NishantK, @xmlgrrl and especially @brettmcdowell) but there's simply no way to get the full flavor of a presentation in a disjointed series of ~140 character semi-cryptic notes.

Please people, write up those blog entries! Tweet the URL of the posting, but give us as much verbiage as necessary to convey actual meaning.

Labels: blogging, Catalyst, Twitter

Posted 4:30 PM (0) comments

Who knew Hospitality suites could do that?

In a posting on the Burton Group Catalyst website, Mountain View's Centrify says:

Visit Centrify in our Hospitality Suite in Aqua 311 on Wednesday, July 29!
More than 1000 enterprise customers, including 38% of the Fortune 50, have selected the Centrify Suite to improve IT efficiency, strengthen regulatory compliance initiatives, and centrally secure their heterogeneous computing environment.

I usually visit the suite to eat, drink and play games. Who knew you could also "improve IT efficiency, strengthen regulatory compliance initiatives, and centrally secure [your] heterogeneous computing environment"! I'm gonna be first in line...

Labels: Burton Group, Catalyst, humor

Posted 5:46 PM (0) comments

Attention architects - BYOB

Pam Dingle posts today ("We’re a little lost.") about her disappointment, nay her disillusionment with the hodge-podge of identity services available to the average enterprise and the decided lack of a roadmap for connecting them up. She notes, "In reality, however, I don’t see a patchwork of complimentary products - I see a whole bunch of products with a whole bunch of overlap and no obvious or well-stated way for an Enterprise to figure out how to knit it all into an actual solution for their original problem. "

She's right, of course. There does need to be a roadmap, a diagram, a "well-stated way" to hook up all of these services so that they are complimentary and they do interoperate rather than compete for attention and bandwidth. It's an issue that came up at last spring's Internet Identity Workshop when Boeing's Marty Schleiff introduced a session called "Enterprise Identity Roadmap for enterprise identity architects: a discussion," and which I wrote about in the newsletter. What I said was:

So why IIW? In a nutshell, precisely because it wasn’t Catalyst or DIDW. Those structured conferences, dominated as they are by slideware presented by a speaker on a stage don’t lend themselves to free-form discussion. Certainly there are “Birds of a Feather” sessions – usually after hours in inconvenient locations. There are also informal get-togethers (usually involving libations) that go into the wee hours while knotty issues are discussed. But there doesn’t seem to be a venue for those involved in planning and implementing enterprise identity systems and architectures to meet in a vendor-neutral environment to swap stories, sound warnings and point out new initiatives. Marty wants to change that.

This seems to be as good a place as any to announce that we have found a venue. At the upcoming Digital ID World (Sept. 8-10 in Anaheim), Program Chair Eric Norlin has convinced me to moderate just such a session - me, a few microphones and (hopefully) an audience of enterprise identity architects - ready to talk about where they are, where they've been, where they hope to go and how they want to get there. If you've an interest in enterprise ID architecture (Pam, are you listening?) then I hope to see you in that audience.

Labels: Catalyst, DIDW, enterprise, identity

Posted 9:10 AM (0) comments

Unexpected moves

Right out of left field comes the announcement that Mike Neuenschwander, formerly Burton Group Vice President and Research Director, has joined Mycroft, Inc. as General Manager. I covered Mycroft ("A marriage, a hot couple, and a single looking for a date at Catalyst") at last summer's Catalyst conference where they announced the merger with Talisen Technologies. Their business is implementing IdM solutions from other vendors - they're in the service delivery and solution implementation business.

The press release said little about what Mike's role will be, so we'll just have to see how it evolves, but I am saddened that I won't have Mike to "kick around" anymore after his Catalyst speeches!

Labels: Burton Group, Catalyst