For my little part in the launch of Sun Microsystems’ Identity Manager 7.0 product, which was announced at Digital ID World on Monday, I manned a display/demo table at the Executive Women’s Forum on Information Security in Fountain Hills, Arizona, last night. Because the women from the Sun Identity Management marketing team who would normally have attended this event were at Digital ID World, I was selected for service. Because I live about 30 minutes from the EWF venue, it was natural for me to be involved – except for one minor detail – I was in the distinct minority. Except for the folks who worked with the food, I was the only male in attendance!

After a career of attending male-dominated technical conferences and trade shows, it felt rather weird to be the only guy. But the people I met couldn’t have been more gracious! The attendees were exceptional contributors to the field of information security – mostly Chief Information Security Officers, Directors of Information Security from major corporations, or highly influential practitioners in the Information Security field. For example the woman who won the Sun-sponsored prize drawing at the end of the evening was Rhonda MacLean of MacLean Risk Partners, who is a Distinguished Senior Fellow with Carnegie Mellon University’s CyLab. It was an honor to be including in such an elite group – even if I was the only man around.

I enjoyed announcing that Sun’s Identity Manager 7.0 product was the first in the Identity Managment market to provide fully-integrated preventative and detective compliance capabilities. Using a demo created by my colleague Nick Crown, I was able to show some interesting capabililties in the product, including creating and importing audit policies, using audit policy based provisioning, conducting audit scans, using policy based certification review and SOD compliance reporting. All good stuff!

One last thing – there is justice in the world. The recipient of Microsoft’s prize – a $500 Tumi gift certificate – was a Sun employee!

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