Well, the cat is out of the bag. I can now blog about the major initiative that has been monopolizing my time for the past six months.

This morning, Slashdot picked up the post by BobB-nw: “Telecommunication companies need to go beyond just providing bandwidth and look into acquiring Internet destination sites that are heavily trafficked, says Sun Microsystems Chairman Scott McNealy. “I have explained to every telco that either you become a destination site, or the destination site will become a telco,” McNealy said at a news conference at Sun Microsystems’ Worldwide Education and Research Conference in San Francisco on Wednesday.”

I am the guy in Sun’s Americas Software Practice tabbed with leading the effort to make Scott’s vision a reality for our large telecom customers. If you were here with me at Sun’s Immersion Week today, you could attend my class for Sun systems engineers on the topic of Project Destination.

Project Destination is a Sun Microsystems initiative to give reality to Scott’s vision that: Telcos must become “Destination Brands” or they will be only “Network Gateways” to companies that are Destination Brands (note that I said “Brand”, not “Site.” The term “site” is too limiting. We are talking about services delivered across the spectrum of online devices – phones, TVs and web browsers.)

A Destination Brand will:

• Attract and retain subscribers to a brand
• High perceived value: what subscribers want, when they want it
• On demand information, media and online participation
• Deliver rich user experience
• Easy to use, responsive, innovative
• Highly personalized – context based
• Visually and aurally stimulating
• Blend media types – photo/video/sound/music/text
• Integrate user experience across three screens
• Mobile device, desktop/laptop and TV
• Enable new business models
• Subscription, personalized advertising, transactions, service aggregation, managed services …

What in the world does this have to do with Identity? Identity is at the very heart of delivering highly personalized, context aware services to subscribers on their choice of device. I like to call it “Identity-enabled Service Orchestration.” Stay tuned over the next few weeks as I discuss issues and solutions in more detail.

Technorati Tags: Identity,
Digital Identity,
Identity Management,
Sun Microsystems,
Destination,
Telecommunications

One of the significant benefits of getting together at training events like Sun Immersion Week is participating in ad hoc whiteboard discussions like the one where I caught my colleague Tom Limanek in an intense Identity Management discussion. In an era of extensive conference calls and virtual interaction, it is sometimes very refreshing to have some serious face time together.

Technorati Tags: Identity,
Digital Identity,
Identity Management,
Sun Microsystems

Let me join the chorus saying welcome to our friends from MySQL who officially joined Sun today! I look forward to learning more about how we can leverage this great technology and organization, together with other Sun software products, to deliver more and more value to those whom we serve.

See you in Santa Clara!

Technorati Tags: MySQL
Sun Microsystems

I am spending the week at Sun Microsystems “Immersion Week,” a yearly event where the technical side of the Sun sales force congregates for technical training and community building. Thanks to a spring snow storm, we were treated to some gorgeous winter sites at the Q-Center in St. Charles, Illinois.

With apologies for the limited clarity affored by my Treo camera, here are a few photos. You can click on any photo to see a larger version on Flickr.

Technorati Tags:
Sun Microsystems,
Winter,
Q-Center

I recently blogged a recommendation for EverNote note-taking software. It seemed like such a great little program to improve my efficiency in keeping notes on my computer.

An improvement, yes, but three features I needed proved problematic:

1. The ability to easily create and maintain outlines within a note or document was very cumbersome.
2. Templates were difficult to create and use, with severe restrictions on editing tools within cells in a template table.
3. Tables were available only within templates and were difficult to create and use.

So, I expanded my search and was pleasantly surprised to learn that Microsoft OneNote had been significantly upgraded since the 2003 version, which I had tested and found lacking.

So, using a 60-day trial copy, I have really come to like OneNote. Templates are are breeze, tables are easy and the outliner is wonderful. Really worth the extra price for the way I use notes. I shouldn’t have been so hasty to dismiss Microsoft in the first place.

Technorati Tags: Note taking

It was good to see Scott Fehrman’s report on the first Sun Identity Manager User Group meeting in the Chicago area, held Tuesday, February 19th. User group meetings such as this are great forums for our customers to provide feedback to Sun and for sharing experiences and best practices that enhance all participants’ abilities to leverage their investment in Identity Management technology and processes.

The next User Group meeting in the Chicago area will be help at the Sun Itasca Office @ 6:30 pm on Thursday May 22nd 2008. The following items will be addressed in that meeting:

• Upgrading Identity Manager (Laurus Technologies)
• Getting more value out of Identity Manager (Deloitte)
• Identity Manager 8.0 Overview (Sun)

If you’re interested in joining the user group, please send an email to “Chicago_IdM_LUG [at] Sun [dot] com”.

Technorati Tags: Identity,
Digital Identity,
Identity Management,
Sun Microsystems

On February 15th, Sun completed its acquisition of Vaau, a premier provider of Enterprise Role Management (ERM) and identity compliance solutions. Please allow me to add my welcome to these great folks and great technology. I was pleased with Sun’s announcement last November to acquire Vaau. It is always great to see good business transactions like this come to fruition.

Last week, I joined Sun software specialists from all over the world at a three day training event focused the RBACx product (now Sun Java System Role Manager) and related methodologies. We got to install to software, kick its tires, discuss the intriguing processes of applying the Vaau technology to business problems and hang out with a few of the key people in the organization.

In our training class, the characteristics that resonated most with me were:

• The ability to define roles in a blended fashion – taking the best of top-down modelling and bottoms-up data mining role discovery methods
• The facilities to not only discover, but manage and maintain role definitons as an organization grows and changes.
• The linkage between RBACx and the Sun Identity Manager product for proactive compliance

I still have much to learn, but am confident this acquisition and the ongoing work to integrate the technology and people into Sun will be positive for our customers and for Sun.

Technorati Tags: Identity,
Digital Identity,
Identity Management,
Sun Microsystems,
Vaau

My son Ryan, a freshman at Arizona State University, pointed me to this video. The global perspective it shares is certainly worth the few minutes it takes to watch.

We who focus professionally on Digital Identity sometimes forget that many of the world’s people have nothing digital to access or protect. For too many, the most important part of personal identity is all wrapped up in how to survive the day.

Technorati Tags: Identity,
Digital Identity,
Identity Management

In an effort to improve my ability to take and retrieve notes on my computer, I have started using EverNote. It is quick and easy to use, but allows the sophistication of adding custom XML based templates so I can tailor it to my working style. A bit of new technology is always fun!

Technorati Tags: Evernote

Early this morning, as Valentine’s Day dawned for me in the Santa Clara Holiday Inn, I met a new hero in my life, Napoleon Dzombe of the African nation of Malawi. Knowing that I would be out of town today, my wonderful wife slipped a small Valentine’s gift into my suitcase before I left home. When I awoke early in the morning, I opened the gift, which included a DVD entitled “The Blessings Hospital Miracle,” and watched it on my laptop.

The film recounts the true story of a remarkable man who emerged from personal poverty against seemingly unsurmountable odds to save thousands of his people from starvation during one of the worst droughts in Malawi. We can learn much from the courage, determination and selflessness of this true champion.

You can watch the entire 25 minute film here or purchase the DVD here.

I highly recommend it.

Thank you, Claudia, for introducing me to true greatness this morning. Happy Valentine’s Day!

Technorati Tags: Leadership