Time To Put Your Thinking Caps On

Mike Neuenschwander has dubbed July as Identity Conference Month. And he should know, given that so many of his signature moments were on stage at the Catalyst conference that will be returning at the end of this month (July 26-29 in San Diego). Catalyst is always the most thought-provoking identity event of the year, but there is added intrigue this year, as a lot of us recurring *characters* are wondering what impact the Gartner takeover of the event (last years was still run by the Burton folk) will have on its ethos. I’ll be dropping in as always to learn, converse, incite and, of course, party.

The week before that, the Cloud Identity Summit (July 18-21) will once again be warming us up for Catalyst by hosting an impressive gathering of subject matter experts and thought leaders talking about the intertwined worlds of identity and the cloud. And this year, I’ll be there too, giving a talk on the future of identity provisioning (July 20 at 12:00pm). Following up on the talks I gave last year at Gluecon and at Catalyst, I’ll be bringing my cred as a provisioning expert to bear in examining if identity provisioning even has a future in the pull-based future of identity (spoiler alert: it does), and what it might look like, given recent developments in the space and advancements in cloud architectures. In an unfortunate scheduling mishap, I will be going up against Pamela Dingle’s session on identity and mobility, which I would have loved to sit in on myself. I’m sure she’ll be peppering her session with cuteness in the form of cats or cuddly toys, so I’m going to have to up the game and incorporate something bad-ass into my session, like Transformers or Angry Birds (Iron Man was so last year). Pam, you’re going down 🙂

Two weeks. Two great conferences. And me at both. So be there or be square!