Thursday, November 16, 2006

DOJ, Ping, and the Disappearing Service Dollar

A friend of mine forwarded an email to me today regarding a project for a client who was interested in deploying Ping Federate. At first, I was pretty excited. I'm a big fan of what Ping has done in the past years - they've brought solid software to solve the world's federation problems. (In the company I used to work for last year, I had the privilege of taking my team of identity consultants to Ping's HQ in Denver to meet the Ping folks and get trained in Ping Federate. Honestly, they've got the highest concentration of brains in a small company I've ever seen. Kudos to Andre.)

When I got the email regarding the project, I noticed that it was in fact a forwarded email from a recruiter who wanted to "staff" a position at the Department of Justice...looking for a person who had experience with the Ping line. Then I saw this press release from Ping, stating:

...PingFederate will be part of the expanded RISSNET architecture used to enable law enforcement and criminal justice agencies throughout the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and the U.S. Territories to share intelligence and coordinate efforts against criminal and terrorist networks that operate in multiple locations.

That's some pretty serious stuff. Eric Norlin (who knows a thing or two about Ping) states this on his ZDNet blog:

Ping Identity announced that the U.S. Department of Justice selected them to provide federation to over 7,300 local law enforcement agencies and 700,000 law enforcement officials.
I was interested. It was definitely something we could respond to. But the email's "staffing" approach of the whole thing kind of threw me off. The press release and the recruiter's email didn't seem to fit.
Anyhow, I got a phone call a few hours ago with the details. Worse than I imagined...they want a "resource" (guaranteed till February! yeehaw.), for a rate so low that we wouldn't even cover our costs. Could it be that the Department of Justice was just looking at a federation deployment for nearly three quarters of a million seats as something to throw a "resource" or two at? Anyone who knows anything about identity will tell you that federation could be pretty complicated stuff. Also, how could the rate possibly be so low? How many layers were between us and DOJ? Who's eating all of the service dollars? Even if there were alot of layers, would DOJ accept a team slapped together to deploy an enabling technology like federation? Somethings not right, definitely not right.

Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Best Identity Management Solution Competition?

SC Magazine has released the Finalists for its Best Identity Management Solution Award. The list of finalists are:



What do you mean Identity Management?? Kind of broad, isn't it?

"Includes user provisioning solutions, single sign-on, password management, user rights revocation, etc."

OH. "Etc." !! Never mind, that clarifies everything.

Sunday, November 05, 2006

Kim Goes Veg

Kim makes some excellent points regarding the inclusion of vegetables into the identity laws. Read for yourself:

The synergistic combination of omnidirectional identifiers and correlation handles on a per-vegetable basis could be the sustainable architecture behind the meta-zucchini infrastructure.

Any metasystem needs to realize that pumpkins may vary in physical appearance, but their basic architecture is the same: stem, seeds and pulp represent the core of our constituent squash identity system.

We hope our commentary will stimulate oral interfacing across the vegosphere and among the “gouderati”.