Recently I have been meeting lots of people at conferences - customers, strangers, friends of Ping Identity, and various Identerati.  I have been presenting them my business card, telling them that I am the concierge of Ping.  I tell them that although we strive to be an open company and they probably already have contacts within the company, if they have any needs or problems and can’t figure out how to get it worked out, that they should contact me and I’ll run it down for them.  I usually get a smile, a thoughtful look, and then they pocket my card, hopefully for future use.

This is one the duties that Ping hired me for - to make sure that as we grow, that we never lose touch with the world around us.  We want to be the Nordstrom of software companies.   So I’ve been charged to be the person who is always available.  It’s a great job!

Contact me at my virtual desk in the lobby - on my mobile: +1(402)650-1979, by email: ssidner at pingidentity.com, or by Twitter: at tootallsid.

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. 

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.

I am getting the chance to talk to some of the thought leaders, visionaries, architects and business owners Ping has lined up to speak at July’s first annual Cloud Identity Summit, and I am writing up a series of short posts from those conversations. The conference's intent is to define the  new world that will deliver security and access controls for cloud computing?

Look for these posts over the coming weeks or check out cloudidentitysummit.com for links from the agenda. The first one, with Cloud Security Alliance executive director Jim Reavis, will post shortly.

I also have posted four short videos, one with each of the guys running the opening workshops, which are one-day, four-hour sesions with some of the brightest minds in the industry. The workshops cover SAML, cloud security, OpenID, OAuth,OAuth/WRAP and XACML.

In the meantime, don’t miss my video invite, shot on the snowy peaks above Keystone, Colo., (and Andre Durand's companion "one" higher video poking some fun at me).

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, we are now offering a new page on our customer support portal, Ideas.

Ideas allows you to share ideas about how to use our products better, or how we might improve them.  Also ideas about the portal and other services are welcome here.  And in the unlikely event that you are not completely delighted with our products or services, this is your place to lodge a complaint.

Like Answers, each Idea can have replies.  So if you see an Idea that you want to comment on, it is easy to chime in.

Finally, you can vote once for each idea, either promoting it or demoting it.   The ideas with the most votes will float to the top, like cream rising on milk.  Speaking of which, each Quarter we will choose the best Idea and award the author with an iPad™ by Apple!!

Myself and other PingIdentians will be monitoring the ideas daily.   We may not respond to all of them, but be assured that we will pay attention to each and every one.

This is your chance to have a voice at Ping Identity and maybe win an iPad™.  After all, we're partners.

We are expanding the breadth of our customer community with new benefits for our paying support customers:

I achieved a long-time professional goal this week - I attended an Internet Identity Workshop - IIW 10.

I was not disappointed.

As the Community Evangelist for Ping Identity, I went to focus on the people who attended more than the mind-candy that the ideas represent.  Ping Identity has long participated in IIW and cares deeply about this community.

Technology filters out of human groups.  The IIW exactly demonstrates this.  I saw two key aspects to IIW - Open Space meetings and Kaliya Hamlin, the organizer.

IIW is based on the concepts of Open Space Technology.  The inventor of Open Space Technology, Harrison Owen, realized that when you get a bunch of experts in a field at a conference, the best ideas come out of the informal interactions outside the presentations.  So he decided to formalize those.  I have to say, I have always been a little suspicious of the touchy-feely sound of an Unconference.  Well, let me tell you, I was wrong - this is serious business, and is focused on Getting Stuff Done.  People come to IIW to learn, to think together, and spark ideas in each other.   The format is pretty simple.  At the beginning of the day, anybody that has a topic that they want to talk about writes it on a big note card, with lots of colored markers.  Then they all line up and one at a time, each person holds up their card, announces the title and what it means, and then goes to the agenda wall, selects a time slot in one of the five sessions and in one of the twenty or so meeting areas, and sticks their card under that session with a sticky note telling the meeting area.   Then the first session starts and everybody picks topics to participate in.

IIW is a shared effort of Kaliya Hamlin, Phil Windley and Doc Searls, but as the facilitator, Kaliya's personality and energy ignite the workshop.  A tough facilitator who can stifle with a word or a gesture anyone who blathers, she is also able to gently coax nervous and shy people.  A guru of user-centric identity herself, who opened the first day with a brilliant summary of Our Story To Date, she is very good at listening and encouraging other gurus to stand up and be heard.  The result is not chaos but true collaboration, and it is mesmerizing to watch Kaliya lead the parts where everyone is together.

Technologists are famously noted for suffering the semi-autism of Asperger's Syndrome, while nursing huge egos that let them conceive lofty goals and then obsessively work toward them.  At IIW, you can feel people working to manage their inhibitions and their egos, to share and to respect, while keeping that edgy impatience that means Stuff Will Get Done.

This IIW is the 10th in five years.   There were 240 people, which Kaliya said is about 60 more than ever before.  I was one of those noobs. And even though I was expected to respect the oldies (and you can be sure I did), I was encouraged to lend my voice to the conversation.

Meetings like IIW are another aspect of social media and social networking.  Like so many inversions caused by things like Web sites telling all about your company, and Twitter showing your thoughts, and blogging, LinkedIn, and Facebook making a permanent record of your ideas, professional career, and personal life, IIW fosters the co-opetition that allows technology to accelerate and grow strong.  If you want to be part of the conversation, you want to show up.   So you find folks from the Netherlands talking about a government fostered market in strong identity, Japanese talking about personal data stores based on telecom data, and lots of geeky women who have something to say and feel comfortable saying it.

Oh, and I couldn't help but sample some mind-candy: OAuth2, UMA, personal data stores, the Open Identity Exchange, PingPong, and Google's thoughts about OpenID.  It was geek heaven!

http://www.greatwhitesnark.com/2010/03/25/difference-between-nerd-dork-and-geek-explained-in-a-venn-diagram/