Microsoft loses their Dick

Dick Hardt has left Microsoft. He joined Microsoft in early December, 2008 and was the CEO of Sxip Identity. Dick joined Microsoft shortly after another identity guru – Stefan Brands – came over with Microsoft’s acquisition of Credentica based in Montreal. Funny tidbit that Dick and Stefan joined fellow Canadian Kim Cameron to work on identity at Microsoft. Were the Canadians taking over?
I was taken aback yesterday when I saw the announcement – by Dick – that he had left Microsoft after one year.

Yesterday was my last day at Microsoft. I worked there a year. When I reflect on 2009, I think of it as the Year of Darkness. I only  wrote a couple blog posts. I was inactive in the OpenID community. I did not talk to press or analysts. I gave no public presentations.

I have to say I wasn't shocked. Dick had made significant waves in the community before he joined Microsoft. His “infamous” Identity 2.0 presentation is nearly legendary. If you haven’t seen it you must watch it. I can only imagine how difficult it was for someone who spent lots of time talking to customers, the public, press and analysts to spending no time doing this. I also know how difficult it is to go from a very small company to a company of what, 85,000 employees?

So I’m willing to bet we see more Dick in 2010.

Technorati Tags: identity management,Dick Hardt,Microsoft,MSFT,Kim Cameron,Stefan Brands,OpenID

Quest’s One-time Password Solution wins awards!

SC Magazine has awarded us 5 stars for our one-time password solution (Quest Defender) and has also made Defender an "SC Recommended product". This is a great achievement for Quest especially since SC Magazine cites some of the key things that we added to Defender over the last 18 months to make it more attractive to customers like:

• Full-featured token integration (hard tokens, soft tokens, SMS and Grid)
• Allowing users with expired Microsoft Active Directory passwords to reset them based on an (OTP) authentication

Of course, tripling the revenues of this product in 2009 was a pretty strong endorsement of both what we are doing with the product and the fact that companies are looking for strong alternatives to the industry leader. We have lots more in store for Defender in 2010 and 2011.

Technorati Tags: Quest,QSFT,Defender,Quest Defender,strong authentication,OTP,security,SecurID,RSA

Is Azure priced too high?

A colleague at the office mentioned that over the holidays he helped build a custom application for a small business in his town and they made some a startling discovery about Azure versus Google pricing. I did track down a blog post by Danny Tuppeny where this was talked about in more detail:

As a .NET developer, I was quite excited to hear about Windows Azure. It sounded like a less painful version of Amazon's EC2, supporting .NET (less painful in terms of server management!). When I saw the pricing, it didn't look too bad either. That was, until I realized that their "compute hour" referred to an hour of your app running, not an hour of actual CPU time. Wow. This changes things. To keep a single web role running, you're looking at $0.12/hour = $2.88/day = $20.16/week = $86.40/month. Anyone that's bought hosting for a small site/app recently will know that this is not particularly cheap!

I also tracked down the Azure pricing at Microsoft's web site and it pretty much confirms the above. You can find Google’s pricing here if you’d like to compare.

Compute time, measured in service hours: Windows Azure compute hours are charged only for when your application is deployed. When developing and testing your application, developers will want to remove the compute instances that are not being used to minimize compute hour billing. Partial compute hours are billed as full hours.

Google is charging per CPU hour versus clock hour. As we probably all know, most applications use very little CPU. Sure, a database or analytics product will suck it back but most middle-of-the-road applications don’t. Especially ones that are used by smaller businesses. In a lot of ways I do agree with the my colleague and the blogger cited above that Microsoft’s pricing is out-of-whack. Should the pricing be competitive? Yes, absolutely. The final point I want to make is based on this quote from Danny:

...and while all programmers will have a preferred language/framework (I'm no exception), many can be swayed by a cool framework or hosting.

If I were Microsoft this is what I’d be worried about: A developer like Mr. Tuppeny who is totally comfortable in .NET who has been converted by this pricing to working in Python with the Google App Engine. Microsoft knows how much “owning” the developer means to their business and this isn’t a great indicator in my opinion. I really do not think that the Azure pricing is geared towards smaller businesses and that’s a problem.

Technorati Tags: Azure,Google,Microsoft,cloud computing

Looking for a new challenge?

A partner of ours has asked me to help them find someone for an identity management position that they have open. Further information is below and if you're interested please send me an e-mail and I'll get you hooked up with them. jackson.shaw(at)gmail.com

Title:   Sales Engineer & Delivery Manager (hybrid role)

Industry:  Professional Services

Vertical:  Security, Identity and Access Management

Location / Territory:  Tri-State  ( NY, CT, PA, NJ)

Sales Engineer/DM primary responsibilities for the role:

Professional Services business development, technical sales lead and delivery oversight in the tri-state region.  Candidate will work closely with VP of Sales to further develop Logic Trends footprint, working closely with a distributed team of specialist (technology and project)and be partnered with a dedicated sales person in mid-2010.  Must be a self-starter, and existing client relationships are a plus, Tri-state quota of approximately $3 million in billed business (multiple customers already exists in region). Candidate will be required to interface with prospects and clients on both a technical, business, and project delivery level.

Experience / Skills:

• BA/BS Degree in Business Administration, Computer Science, Engineering, Accounting or Information Systems
• Strong oral and written communications skills
• Project Management certification a plus
• IAM Technical sales experience and knowledge (AM, IdM, Recert., SSO, DLM, DRM, etc)… including solution demonstration
• Professional Services delivery experience (i.e. delivery manager)
• Strong potential for growth and acceptance of additional responsibilities
• Ability to take a broad view of his/her position and take initiative to communicate, interact and cooperate with others
• Demonstrated ability to write proposals and to participate in presentations
• Open to travel requirements
• Ability to work as a member of a team and independently
• Familiarity with IdM offering and messages of key vendors: Microsoft, Oracle, Sun, CA, Courion, etc.
• Prior Big 4 or leading system integrator experience

Compensation:

• Base Salary...  TBD
• OTE, total compensation... TBD
• 401k... matching up to 5%
• Health, Dental, etc
• Paid Time Off