Interview with Dave Kearns, Network World

Excellent. Dave Kerns today, you have held a so-called un-conference workshop, the world cafe, your subject was integrated identity management. Can you tell us what the session produced in terms of results? It was an interesting experiment that we did there by setting up tables around the, the dining area for people to come in and discuss various aspects of integrated identity management.

It was semi successsful in that we did get some good discussions, not as many as we'd like to see, but we were talking about the, the four aspects of using best breed solutions that you cobble together yourself, or going with a single vendor to provide all of your, I needs, whether you should keep all of the applications and services in cloud or in the data center, perhaps in some combination, you, what we found was that the, the people who did participate here are pretty much a reflection of the world. As a whole, the same answers came back to us. The cloud is not trustworthy yet.

It is not secure. We prefer to keep things in our own data center, and yet it doesn't scale well to a global enterprise. No single vendor has everything we need.

So we do have to, even if we go with one vendor, add in other applications and services and use them, best of breed means so many different things to so many people that if it was hard to, to quantify what they had to say, but what they said was that really, they like to just pick and choose the things they want to use and hope that they can put 'em together in the proper way so that they get integrated identity management, which we defined as, as a seamless bit with no holes that just works. It was an interesting experiment.

As I say, it wasn't a fully successful experiment, but it could be with a little refinement. Well, it seems that you took a visit to the real world. I'm Sorry. You sort of visited the real world, didn't you? Yes. Yes. It Really Is. It's whereas we Analyst normally are somewhere up in cloud Cuckoo's home.

Well, I prefer to call it the ivory tower. It sounds so much better that way, but yeah, you have to get out there amongst the people and find out what people are really doing, as opposed to what we think they should be Doing. It could be an humbling experience too. It often Is.

Yes, because you realize that what people are doing today are the things you were telling them. They should be doing five years ago and it's just taken them that long to catch up implementation is the hard part. And unfortunately, most people don't have the budget to do it as well as should, as you say, it's a humbling experience and we need to with the, the, from we, what the world is.