We achieved a major milestone this week surpassing 500 enterprise and SaaS customers.   We want to personally thank you for choosing Ping.  If you happen to be in San Diego this week for Burton Catalyst, come celebrate with us tonight at the Marriott Gaslamp Altitude bar. 

It was a big-brain mixer last week at Ping’s Cloud Identity Summit (CIS). If you were a sponge, you went home soaking wet.

Integration, standards, services, security, identity, trust, implementation, cooperation, engineering.

My final #cis2010 blog entry is about Kathi Becker, the wizard that organized the 2010 Cloud Identity Summit.  When Andre Durand, Ping Identity’s CEO, conceived of this 5 short months ago, he turned to his old friend, Kathi Becker, to make it happen.

Andre was one of the partners in the Digital ID World (DIDW) conferences, along with the founder, Phil Becker, Kathi’s husband.  When the first DIDW was getting organized, Kathi could see that they were really struggling.  So she offered her talents, pulled it off, and the rest is, as they say, history.

Kathi’s long-time day job is as a management consultant with PLB Ventures where she is a Managing Partner. For over 30 years she has provided management consulting and leadership education. She is an expert in developing educational programs that “cut through the noise and get to the meat of the matter” helping executives develop leadership capabilities to achieve goals they never thought possible. Her ability to craft and deliver thought-provoking programs always leads to well attended, critically acclaimed sessions with measurable long-lasting results.

Kathi’s clients include IBM, Microsoft, American Airlines, British Petroleum, U of Chicago Medical Center, Kaiser Permanente and Ford Motor Company.

The 2010 Cloud Identity Summit was by all accounts a huge success.  The partnership between Andre and Kathi is another example of the power of community to work together to achieve great things.  Next year should be even better as Andre, Kathi and team put their heads together to come up with the 2011 Cloud Identity Summit in Keystone.

When I saw Phil last week at the Summit, I told him that the secret in life for us guys was “marrying up”.  He laughed knowingly and nodded his head in agreement.

On the final day of the 2010 Cloud Identity Summit in Keystone I caught up with Michele Leroux Bustamante, the Chief Security Architect for BiTKOO.  Her colleague, Doron Grinstein, had presented their flagship product, Keystone, to the conference earlier in the day.  

When I asked her why she’d come to CIS, Michele said she had come to support the BiTKOO sales effort in their Solutions booth and because identity is one of her passions. She knew that she would get to see a lot of people she knew and meet new ones. “I’ve already seen the folks from Microsoft and we’re based on the Microsoft platform.  I knew I’d get to meet the Ping folks.  I’d hoped to meet some new folks who share this passion.  I’ve already gotten to have some great conversations about the challenges we all face.  As a group, we need to come together and agree on the issues we’re dealing with, so we can inter-operate better and have our products communicate better.”

Then I asked her what she’d gotten out of Thursday’s program.  Michele replied, “Well, I really liked John Shewchuk’s presentation.  First on all, he’s really fun to watch; secondly, he talked about a really long term vision, which I think somebody does need to do, just to get everyone thinking about the potential for claims, the potential for federation and identity management in general; and I loved that [Microsoft] shared a vision that I had already been thinking along the lines of, and that is that OAuth2 is a much simpler form of federation, that may have a chance of being vastly adopted than we’ve seen so far with some of the other protocols, like SAML, WS-Federation, and WS-Trust.  Not that they’re not great protocols - they are - but we have challenges with mobile devices and REST-based services and Silverlight and Ajax.  How do we get a unified view of authentication, authorization, and communication with identity?  This makes it very possible.”

On Wednesday, the second day of the Cloud Identity Summit 2010, I talked to Chuck Mortimore, the Product Management Director for Identity and Security, from Salesforce.com.  Chuck has a long history in the Interent identity community, and along with Eric Sachs from Google and Andrew Nash from PayPal who are also attending CIS 2010, he and Salesforce.com are major factors in the future of identity.

I asked Chuck why he came to the conference.  He laughed and reminded me that he was speaking Thursday afternoon.  But then he went on to say that this conference has allowed him to meet with some other like minded companies and to discuss collaborating on new initiatives. Chuck also likes to hear what customers have to say, so he appreciated the talks on Wednesday by some of the Ping Identity customers. He said that the Unconference in the afternoon was great, because after a general problem was stated, he could ask customers what that meant to them and whether they had any related problems. "For a product manager, this is great stuff!'

During the Tuesday workshops at the Cloud Identity Summit I had the pleasure of talking to John Dilley, Product Architect, Akamai Technologies.  If you've never heard of Akamai, you've still used them, probably everyday.  They are a key part of the Internet infrastructure, providing edge content and application servers worldwide to speed delivery or Web pages and applications.  If you watched the World Cup on your PC on espn3.com, you have Akamai to thank for making it possible for millions of people to watch simultaneously.  They also are experts at hosting applications for large corporations that need to get the app servers close to their users.

John has been with Akamai for over 10 years, joining right before they IPO'ed.  I listened, rapt, as he warmed to his subject and told me about some of the stuff they do and some of how they do it.

I asked John how he liked the morning session. John had attended Gunnar Peterson's and Chris Hoff's workshop on the security in the cloud.  He said it was great, covering a topics in risk management.  John said this is not his area of expertise and that he found the information really insightful.

I asked him why he came.  John said that he could see identity becoming more of a factor as they think of new ways to help speed the Internet.  He figured that the Cloud Identity Summit would be great way to start to learn about it and meet other people who were focused on the cloud.

It’s basic human nature. The more difficult it is for someone to use something the less likely it is to get used. And HR applications are no exception.