Thursday, February 25, 2010

Gerry Gebel to Join Axiomatics

Gerry Gebel, long time Burton Group analyst – recently acquired by Gartner - is joining Axiomatics to ramp up the company’s US presence. To quote Gerry’s blog entry:
After nearly 10 years at Burton Group, I’ve decided to join Stockholm-based Axiomatics to lead their U.S. operations. Working at Burton was a wonderful experience that benefited me immensely personally and professionally. This has been an amazing time in the IdM industry, and hopefully we were able to instigate some positive changes along the way.
Joining Axiomatics gives me an opportunity to work on the supplier side of the industry – and be more actively engaged in helping enterprises solve problems! This job is going to pose lots of new challenges for me, but I look forward to all of it.  Babak and Erik and their team in Stockholm have created a great authorization platform based on XACML, so you can to hear a lot about that from me in the future…
First, I want to congratulate Gerry. This will definitely be a challenge for him and one that I am sure he will both enjoy and be successful at. It's not easy taking a European company to the United States but the best step is to get someone from the US to run your US operation. So the first step has been accomplished. Congrats Axiomatics! In case you don’t know what Axiomatics does it is in the XACML authorization business.
Axiomatics can help you with this transformation using entitlement management based on XACML. Our products and services support all aspects of access policy life cycle management. We are not just another access control company. As an active member of the OASIS XACML committee, Axiomatics is not only following the XACML standard but driving it forward to ensure customers stay ahead.

Entitlement Management based on Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) and the XACML standard offers a solution. Standardized authorization services will be base components in all future IT infrastructures. Axiomatics offers solutions for enterprise-wide, fine-grained and context-aware access control based on these new standards and helps customers with this shift towards a sustainable enterprise architecture.
I’m beginning to see more customers thinking about both externalized authentication (SAML) and authorization (XACML) but the industry is still nascent. Will Microsoft’s release of Geneva (1H2010) raise the water level for everyone? Absolutely. The only problem I have with both SAML and XACML is they generally require that software products are written to those standards. Legacy applications are still legacy applications using hard-coded, older authentication and authorization systems unless they are re-written to support the new systems and many of these legacy applications will never be re-written.

Gerry’s got a tough row ahead of him. But, I know it’ll be a fun one! (Just like sailing in storm conditions can be fun if you know what you are doing!)

Good luck Gerry!

2 comments:

Richard Blackham said...

I couldn't think of a better guy for the job. You are absolutely right Jackson. European companies moving to the US need US nationals to lead the launch. I'm sure you, like me, can think of some notable failures.
Good luck Gerry.

Unknown said...

Thanks for the very kind words Jackson! Life is full of challenges, so there is no sense taking the easy path :-).

Stop by the next time you come through SLC.

Gerry