What is there to learn from all this and why does it matter to you? My experience is not exhaustive and I am no authority on dishing career advice, but I wanted to write a few ideas as a former job seeker and an interviewer that I think really might be valuable to you.

Take the path of MOST resistance

You might be inclined to do just the opposite and take the easiest path to your destination, but I have found that there is no shortcut to landing a killer job. If you are just starting out in your career then you need to begin building your foundational tech skills by becoming an expert in LDAP or Linux or scripting of some kind (Shell, Perl, whatever) and using LinkedIn to connect with folks you meet and know. For those with more experience, you might find yourself avoiding that awful Director or Sr. Manager who always seems to have something negative to say and isn’t allowing you into his close network. I would suggest taking to battle the most difficult challenges and projects in your environment and don’t waste precious time being shy about your intentions. Make it known that it’s not about YOU, or HIM or anything personal. It is about the work! Many but not all people can get their foot in the door or climb the corporate ladder by being nice or by having an “In” with the right people, but don’t count on that person being you. Take stock in yourself and make it an all-in proposition. Go with gusto and “Either we have a breakthrough to more successful relations or all bets are off!” There is no other way. Put your egos aside and get the work done.

Photo Courtesy of Alan Kahler

In preparing for interviews with job candidates, I search them online using LinkedIn and search engines. Whether you like it or not, for most professionals, your LinkedIn profile and online persona is your new resume and can help put you at advantage over others looking for the same job. Resumes work for submitting yourself to jobs at the big job boards and at a few of your favorite companies but once your resume is discovered, how your potential employers perceive you can be shaped heavily by what they found out about you in professional networks. If you haven’t started already, begin sharing your capabilities and achievements on LinkedIn and write some stories about them on your blog that will show your expertise. Doing so should help you prepare for the dreaded first question that start off many interviews: “So tell me a little about yourself.” You might be tempted to say something like “Duh, haven’t you read my blog?” but resist that temptation because the interviewer has already read your blog and is evaluating your speaking and presentation skills.

Taking these steps and building a “living resume” online will show that you are managing your career as diligently and skillfully as you would manage yourself and your responsibilities if you are extended a job offer. For those of you already employed, this discipline may help solidify your standing with your current employer and may help you get that promotion or raise that you have been holding out for. The best way to fail at this is to wait until you are a job seeker to begin blogging or updating your LinkedIn profile.

Hiring Suggestions For IT Managers

Most hiring managers (who are career or professional managers) do not have the background or expertise in Identity Mgmt to put architects, engineers and admins through the paces and test their technical abilities, so different tactics are needed to qualify whether you have a good fit for a position or not. Even if you do have prevous experience in this domain, the following suggestions will help avoid many of the frustrations and pitfals you are likely to encounter:

1. Prescreen candidates by asking them to fill out a pre-interview questionnaire (like this one) to evaluate their qualifications prior to inviting for further interviews.
2. Write more accurate and compelling job descriptions that will deter those who are not qualified or do not have the right skills from ever applying for the position.
3. Ask the top talent on your team or organization to refer their friends (who are also likely to be top talent) for the position.
4. Always be building your network of professionals on LinkedIn or other social networks that will help be more efficient in the recruiting process and keep a pulse on qualified professionals that you can reach out to when needed. (I.e. don’t wait for HR to do this for you)

If you are a new manager, or simply new to Identity Management, why not make the effort to build up your knowledge about the subject to make you more effective at understanding the issues and managing your team? I have found that IT managers with responsibility for integrating or maintaining IdM systems come and go, but the good ones who stick around are those with some technical background or who have more advanced understanding than an average IT manager does. And it will do a lot to help build credibility with the team you lead and the peers who have trusted you to take responsibility for such an important technology domain.

If you are patient, relentless and determined, these suggestions will work for you. I get emails from job seekers and recruiters on a weekly if not daily basis asking similar questions, and from what I can tell the job seeking and recruiting/hiring process would go a lot smoother if some of these common sense suggestions were more consistently followed. If you find that your job search misfiring and you are not having success landing a job, it might be time to contact the professionals over at TheLadders.com for a professional resume makeover and career coaching. Or it might also be time to just take a weekend (or an entire week) and go live in the mountains and get in touch with who you are, where you want to go and how to get there. Prayer. Meditation. Sabbatical. Whatever you call it, taking time out regularly to relax your mind and revive your spirit is necessary whether you are a job seeker or not. You don’t want to burn out before you get the job.

For further reading I recommend The Start-Up of You by Reid Hoffman

Godspeed and good luck to you! Post your experiences, questions or suggestions in the comment box for posterity, thank you.

Managing IdM In Uncertain Times 2009

Managing IAM in Uncertain Times

Since I don’t really have a book to sell (yet) I am posting the outline of the book up here and I invite any and all of you who might be interested in reading and giving feedback, whether directly to me via LinkedIn or by leaving a comment here in the blog post. If you are interested in reviewing future drafts of the manuscript please indicate so in your post. As much as work and family keeps me busy at all times, I am excited at the potential that this volume has to address a critical need in our industry, as well as providing guidance and resources specifically to managers and IT professionals looking to take their careers to the next level or simply adding new core skills and experiences. I would be forever grateful and appreciative for any feedback, questions or comments you may wish to offer. I promise in return the collective wisdom and insights from the past 4 years as an IdM leader/engineer/architect at VMware will be presented concisely and in an actionable format that you can put to use immediately, as well as provide case studies and templates available which alone will be extremely valuable resources.

Thanks for reading and best wishes in your endeavors in 2012!

Within the Identity Management (IdM) space, this trend could not be more profound. As companies migrate away from enterprise software deployments towards SaaS apps in droves, the justification for enterprise IdM (or WAM) solution does not fit quite as nicely as it once did. In fact, looking at the success of SalesForce.com and availability and support of modern protocols for 3rd party SSO integration (SAML/OAuth, etc…) and many other apps following suit, the options for SaaS apps continues to present viable alternatives and following this logic, more nimble IdM deployments at a fraction of the cost. Looking at Identity & Infrastructure management from VMware perspective there is a comprehensive set of technologies that can be used to build, run, deploy and secure robust business applications. Today, many of these are deployed using a Public Cloud service (somebody else’s infrastructure) but as this technology moves along on the technology adoption curve and some trust/assurance/liability questions are answered, it will gain more momentum and extend its reach into the enterprise space. In certain cases where security or high assurance is needed, an on-premise (Private Cloud) solution that can be tailored to a company’s or government’s specific requirements would be necessary.

Coming back to the Andreessen article and with all due respect to Oracle as a great and mighty successful American company, a lot more folks are taking notice to what I have been saying for some time now. From an investor perspective Oracle might be a good place to keep your assets safe, but with a growing list of compelling alternatives, if Oracle would stop charging prices like it’s 1999 (or 2007) the situation would not seem as dire as they appear they might become. Many of Oracle products are now available through their On-Demand network for more SaaS model services but will that be enough (making them available as a SaaS service) to make good with customers and keep the competition off their heels? Disclaimer: Having never used Oracle On-Demand services I can only venture to guess that even their SaaS model services are priced with premiums.

On the other hand, VMware continues to make interesting strides in virtualizing mobile platforms along with which a user’s identity and entitlements must travel. Access policies, provisioning and compliance must be monitored and controlled across mobile applications and platforms. So with VMware’s Thin App provisioning (the dev team for the latest incarnation being a great group of guys in my neighborhood right up here in Bellevue, Wa) and entitlements around who can access what, the tools available for managing identities across clouds and devices gets even more interesting!

Godspeed, dear innovation! What say you? What do you have to gain or lose with lower cost IdM implementations and more efficient computing platforms?

Having spent a fair amount of time at the VMware booth at Oracle Open World and witnessed the intense interest in virtualizing everything Oracle, from RAC and Database servers; at the VMware Booth Dave Welch from House Of Brick Technologies attests it has had Tier 1 workloads on VMware since 2006 (and seen $ millions of capex/opex reductions), there were no shortage of folks from the audience taking note; to Middleware and as I have discussed Oracle IdM on VMware as well. Sadly, there are others from various industries who have not even begun to virtualize their Oracle infrastructures due to Oracle’s previous stance on support running their products on VMware.

VMware Snapshot Manager

Beyond the benefits of snapshots and virtualization for the Upgrade scenarios there are the extraordinary stories for consolidation itself to be told. Infrastructure consolidation invariably leads to other interesting possibilities such as cloning (which I talk more about here) for building out new environments, making your infrastructure portable to make building out cloud infrastructure more efficient, to even being the key to your cloud security, as Art Coviello talked about at the RSA conference this week.

So in all honesty, I don’t feel that the announcement from the Evil Empire in Redwood Shores is for me so much as it is for other large companies I know exist out there with sizable physical infrastructures. I have seen success and failures due in large part to the virtualized environment (or lack thereof) so to encourage those of you who have not gone down that path, that now you have an open doorway to bring your support issues and take another hard look across your IT infrastructure of prime opportunities for consolidation and to better realize benefits from this Age of Virtualization, which arguably is already giving way to the Age of Cloud Computing or Agility as VMware executives like to describe it.

With that being said, a huge thanks is due to Oracle, who is now only slightly less evil, for getting out of the way of IT innovations, economic recovery and for giving the power of choice back to the customer.

As always, feel free to leave your comments here in the blog thread. And if you are in need of assistance or want more resources on virtualizing your Oracle environment with VMware, head over to http://www.vmware.com/oracle for more information.

It hasn’t been too long since I last gave some predictions about the future of IdM, but since then there have been some interesting developments. First of all I should give the usual disclaimer that I am giving my own opinions in this blog post, and not speaking officially on behalf of VMware. With that said, let’s talk about IdM.

The industry has been abuzz with ideas about “Identity As a Service” or IDaaS for short (as if we needed more acronyms!), with different approaches layed out succinctly by Frank Villavicencio in a blog post back in 2010. However, without taking pain to spell out, it is a trend that can easily be marginalized as another service bus that must be deployed and managed in an enterprise without much thought about leveraging new deployment models such as public or private clouds. In fact, VMware has a lot of API and SOA based (so-called) Identity Services. While they are consumed very much like any Web Service, they are not being managed or deployed differently than any business application.

Latourell Falls, 2003

I remember the first time I heard about an appliance for managed IdM back in 2005 that was pitched by Oblix at a customer meeting. While we will see these technologies like Web Services, Identity APIs and SAML used throughout the organization, I think in 2011 we will see the appliance based IdM implementations accelerating and taking hold nicely and at a much faster pace. Well even if not so new, they will be embraced for sure. With new products from VMware like vCloud Director and the bounty that vCenter will enjoy from the Ionix acquisition in 2010, it will offer architects and IT leaders more robust tools for efficiently deploying and managing their IdM services and infrastructures. This is one of the biggest opportunities in the data center today, I feel, which IdM in a broader sense is positioned incredibly well to benefit from.

Which leads me to how I see the two major forces in play that will profoundly affect the way companies adopt and manage IdM in the coming year.

• Consolidation – (And I’m not talking about acquisitions…) Driven by the desire to reduce costs of managing large data centers,and taking advantage of opportunities to more effectively utilize a disaster recovery zone, cloud models for computing will allow us to achieve re-use and consolidation much more efficiently than previously possible. This will be an essential strategy for Directors and managers to add to their IT playbooks as most companies will begin to move alot of their apps to some form of cloud-based computing model, and we desparately don’t want to migrate server sprawl or VM sprawl practices into the cloud.
• Next Gen IdM – Back in June I keyed into the idea that Identity & Access services will be available in the “drinking water” (just look at Salesforce) and as more partnerships form, trust will be further established and companies will begin to leverage more SaaS and PaaS services where IdM is just one of the services available in that environment. With VMware’s acquisition of Tri-Cipher in 2010, imagine the possibilities of this (or what would become of any 3rd party partnership) when IdM capabilities exist in the platform that you deploy your cloud apps on (Think VMforce, vFabric, or any other vendors (which I could mention but won’t *wink*) who may be using OpenSSO, Shibboleth, Facebook Connect, etc… for their IdAM requirements.

After giving one of my talks at Open World last year, I was approached by (of all people…) a security architect from Microsoft who pressed me with the question about “What makes this any different because at the end of the day, it’s still a Web Service, right?” Well for one thing, maybe the guy attended the wrong conference because we covered a lot of ground at VMworld 2010! On a more serious note, what we are seeing is not just consuming services but the way these services are deployed and managed. Incidentally, I came across a new hash tag today, perhaps this will be the newly recognized trend in 2011 #MSHyperVfail Anybody?

All biases aside, the ways in which you will be able to deploy, manage HA and achieve distributed computing models will be fundamentally different than we have for the most part been able to achieve. But the best thing yet is that when it comes to Identity & Access management, the cost and complexity barriers will be significantly less than we know it today.

My short presentation was focused on helping Oracle IdM customers get a handle on the top pain points that a company might encounter from an operations perspective, and I offered some insights on the challenges one will face and a VMware specific solution to the problem. In essence, if you can build your Oracle IdM foundation on VMware vSphere starting Day 1, it will lend itself to dramatic time/cost savings and speed with regards to building out new environments and horizontally scaling those environments as your business and IT infrastructure evolves.

Also, as an EMC company, VMware employees enjoy a great partnership and access to world-class tools and support for managing the Oracle database, which is the very foundation for Oracle IdM. As such, another of the practices we use at VMware, which I also discussed in the talk at OOW, is not as much VMware focused as it is on the EMC technology, but it has to be included to paint a complete picture for improving efficiency of your operations environment. Of course, some of you were quick to point out that EMC’s SRDF isn’t the only company to provide block level copy of Oracle data, we happen to think it’s a really good one worty of your consideration. For more about this process, you can view my VMworld presentation on managing Oracle data with SRDF, or you can get more from your local DBA or straight from EMC, such as EMC’s own Oracle Storage Guy.

For those of you who didn’t attend either talk or catch the link on my Twitter post, here is my OOW presentation. Being only given 30 minutes I could not go into too much technical detail here, so please forgive me. You can, however, talk with your in-house IdM Architect/Admin or IdM consultant about how you can build your Oracle IdM environment similar to the way I talk about in my presentation.

In addition to presenting at the VMworld booth I also got a chance to talk to a director at Oracle about collaborating on some white papers for publication on OTN on best practices and configuration specs for building and running Oracle IdM on VMware vSphere. There is nothing like this that I am aware of, and if there is (please share your stories with me) then this will just make it an official collaboration between VMware and Oracle. We are just getting started, and I would expect this to be available to the public sometime in Q1 of 2011. You can follow my blog’s RSS feed or my Twitter as that is where I will make the announcement when these papers are available. Another way is to check www.vmware.com/oracle for the latest updates on this collaboration.

On a final note, I received some some sad news last week on the heels of Oracle Open World that Oracle will be losing Rohit Gupta to run another company in the Bay Area. Rohit has been around the Oracle IdM space as long I can remember Oracle being in this business (circa 2005) in field enablement and product management. I got a chance to hear Rohit speak in person at Burton Catalyst this year, as the last speaker to an audience of very thirsty IT guys and a bunch of long winded corporate sponsors, he hit the grand slam with a speed 2 minutes under his allotted time with grace, humor and a technical acumen that’s refreshing coming from a VP. Rohit, you will be missed by many and I’m confident you will succeed famously at BMC as you did at Oracle. And if not, I’m sure there could be an open door for you at VMware.

Have a great week, everybody and feel free to comment here on my blog and get some conversations going about how you’ve put any of these ideas to use in your environment.

I will be in San Francisco at VMworld next week presenting “Automated Refresh of Oracle Data” during the Oracle Storage Guys session at VMworld. Look for Session ID: EA7061 on the topic of Creating an Internal Oracle Database Cloud Using vSphere in your handbook. I will be sharing how we shaved days off our Environment Refresh processes and significantly reduced error rates using EMC’s SRDF/TimeFinder and custom scripts managed via PPM workflows to achieve greater levels of efficiency and accuracy.

It will be presented twice, so you can catch this session on Monday or Thursday at the following times.

Monday: Moscone South Room 308 @ 12:00-1:00 PM
Tursday: Moscone West Room 2007 @ 10:30-11:30 AM

Also, if you are headed to Oracle Open World in September, look for me at the VMware booth. I will be there to talk about how VMware, in addition to the EMC/SRDF solution described at VMworld for bootstrapping Oracle DB instances, uses vSphere to clone and build out new Oracle Identity Management environment. I blogged about how awesome this is awhile back, but this will give you a chance to hear a 6-month progress update and ask any questions. Stay tuned for more details on which days and times.

See you there!

1.) Practice your photog skills to perfection with the Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 USM prime which all the greats use, and produces beautiful out-of-focus backgrounds due to its shallow depth-of-field. Most kit zoom lenses can make you lazy and usually is quite slow (unless you pay a lot of extra money for a faster zoom) and often produce images of sub-par quality, especially in low light. An excellent quality zoom for the 50d that won’t break the bank is the Tamron AF 17-50mm F/2.8 SP XR Di II VC.

2.) Use Auto ISO – because it works extremely well on the 50d and it’s one less thing you need to worry about in 80% of shooting situations. However, to produce the cleanest (noise free) images make sure you are shooting at ISO 800 or less. Unless you like that really grainy, gritty look for artistic effect, then shoot at 1600 or higher, but focusing can be difficult in low light so you might need to manual focus, itself a fine art.

3.) Perhaps the main reason anybody buys a 50d instead of the EOS Rebel T2i its speed. Your 50d comes with a whopping 6.3 frames per second, twice as fast as the T2i, which is quite nice for action shots, kids or anything on the move that is important to get right so don’t be afraid to occassionaly set this puppy on multi-exposure setting and take a bunch of captures in short burst. But don’t overuse this, because you will end up wasting a lot of disk space and spending a lot of time asking whether this or that image is best.

4.) One of the biggest mistakes amateur photographers make is producing under exposed images. So commit to learning Manual mode, Aperture priority, Shutter priority, EV compensation or all of the above. Getting images properly exposed in the camera makes for editing, sharing and printing your photos a lot more enjoyable. This also means avoiding extreme lighting conditions, or extreme variations in lighting E.g. where there is extremely bright and really dark areas in your viewfinder.

5.) To really take advantage of the 50d, you need to learn about RAW image capture and how to fine tune RAW conversions in your favorite photo editing software such as Adobe Lightroom (my favorite) or Photoshop Elements, which is also a good choice. Shooting in RAW produces the largest files for which to base a master file for printing, and is an excellent capture mode for landscapes or formal portraits. RAW capture will give you about 2 stops protection in either over or under exposure, which you compensate for in RAW conversion process. The 50d also allows you to capture a RAW+Jpeg so you can save the RAW as a permanent archive, and get straight to the Jpeg to share online with friends, and if you practiced all of the above and use follow your creative vision, you will capture Jpeg images that are excellent prints up to 16×20.

6.) Keep the camera in “Evaluative metering” mode. It makes the best use of pre-defined exposure settings that are programmed into your camera in most shooting situations. Explore other exposure modes at your risk; there are some scenes (like black tux and white wedding dress) that are better suited to center-weighted or spot exposures, but unless you are planning on becoming a pro, the Evaluative metering mode is your best bet.

7.) There are many different preset picture styles that come with the 50d, such as standard, portait, Landscape, neutral, faithful and monochrome. If you are shooting RAW, none of these settings really matter, but if you are shooting RAW+Jpeg or Jpeg mode, then select a shooting mode to suit your taste. I prefer the Neutral or Faithful mode as it renders colors closest to reality. I then set to adjust saturation, hue, constrast, etc… in Lightroom in post-edit session.

8.) If you get into shooting with a Canon Speedlight, you are in for a real treat because the 50d has a great Auto-Mode and a very fast 1/8000th of second sync speed. For most non-pro photographers, using Flash can be hit or miss because it’s so easy to misuse. For example, it’s nice to use a flash when taking pictures of people in sunlight because it prevents eye sockets from going dark. And balancing flash with natural light takes practice, but once you get the hang of it will dramatically improve your photography. If you want to use your Speedlight and take professional looking pictures, buy a Lightsphere Collapsible by Gary Fong.

So I hope you didn’t expect “50 Tips for shooting with Your New 50D” because nobody would every read, let alone remember 50 great tips. These 8 tips are practical as they are challenging, and you will likely spend many months (and hopefully years) ahead practising and improving the same basics over and over. There are never really any advanced moves or secrets to taking great pictures, but basic moves executed with vision and foresight.

On a final note, you probably know that I have been a very happy 40d and 50d owner until one day this past Spring I decided it was getting too much of a chore to take out all my equipment and lug around for casual and social shooting situations. Thus the humor in my friend Bryan Dormaier’s question at a 15 year reunion “Where are your lenses and shit?” I laughed so loud, I was nearly in stitches! So Bryan, FYI… I don’t carry them anymore since I traded down for a Canon S90, which is by far easier to carry around and is easier to grab casual photos which are perfect for what I want to do with them. On the downside, as great they can be, smaller cameras are much easier to steal, be treated like a plastic toy or drop into a toilet by your 2 year old.

All the products I mentioned can be found in the Photography section of My Favorite Things.

Good luck shooting, and I will look forward to seeing your photos online!

So, running WebLogic on the hypervisor is compelling, but I doubt many companies will want to migrate to Oracle VM in order to obtain this advantage.  Check out the recent Gartner report that VMware is alone in the Leader Magic Quadrant for virtualization, so this is no slam dunk for Oracle, Microsoft, or any other vendor.   But challenges are ahead for Oracle in virtualization on hypervisor, as one article puts it, “Either they (Oracle) promote VMware, and abandon their own product, or they abandon their customers, but keep their product.”   I haven’t really expressed much of an opinion here, as much as I have doubts about customers reaction to the technology that’s available.  I’m not so much of a virtualization guy as I am an IdM guy, but time will tell, and with any luck Oracle may relax their position of resistance against virtualization from their Palo Alto brethren.

The Big Switch

But going beyond the datacenter, now many customers have the option to run Java apps in the cloud rather than their own infrastructure using VMForce.  My bets are that history will repeat itself, and  this trend will only continue as companies abandon in-house server farms and infrastructure, and as Nicholas Carr aptly describes in The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, will opt for deployment to Cloud machines much the same way companies abandoned generating their own power and began using centralized electricity provided by the power grid in the early part of the last century. 

With that said, IdM technology is in for a roller coaster ride as the tidal waves of change come and we look at how to manage and scale IAM services across a broad spectrum from internal IT to private clouds to the public cloud for partners, customers and employees.  It is looking like the cost and complexity of extending Federated SSO across multiple protocols (not all customers will have SAML, WS-Sec) will be a hassle unless you factor in the potential of cloud services and a hub & spoke model.  It makes me wonder if IdM will go the way of the centralized power grid and Cloud Services (IaaS, PaaS, et al) or maybe it’s already happening.   And as Coby Royer points out in a recent blog post, “I can install the old style IAM tools, this is missing a huge opportunity for cost savings—putting standard infrastructure for IAM into the “drinking water” is the wave of the future.”  In an economy like this, that logic is becoming much easier to buy into than say in 2008 before the recession started to hit IT budgets. 

As an old hand at Oracle IdM (going on 10 years now) it is a bit hard for me to digest, but my instinct tells me that survival means adapting to the seas of change rather than trying to run from them.  There is a bright future and a lot of pent up demand in cloud services, where new models will soon overshadow the shortcomings of client/server and internet architectures.   The old school IAM stacks are not going away anytime soon, but the IdM professional will need to learn new models and standards to keep pace with where this industry might be heading.

Anyways, time will tell.  Leave a comment if you think differently.

Peter Gabriel's Scratch My Back

This update was too long for Facebook and Twitter and I’m too much of a Peter Gabriel fan to limit my comments to 420 characters, so for you regular readers I hope you don’t mind this little bit of personal wandering, I will get back to IdM soon enough…

I enjoyed listening to Peter Gabriel’s new album called Scratch My Back from beginning to end this morning. I never wanted the songs “Red Rain” or “I Grieve” to end, and this album is like a continuation of that experience, but somehow on an even more personal level. Peter is getting older (His “So” album released in 1986) and in a way hearing this album is both reassuring humanity and inspiring at the same time.

The mellow tempo is sustained through the entire album, with some moments of legendary Peter Gabriel genius shining through.  For this reason, a lot of critical commentary came out regarding ,  confusing critics and disappointing many fans, but I instantly connected with it and appreciated the focus on his arrangement and vocal performance.  I love the orchestra in the background, and Peter’s voice breakting through during moments of deep conviction.

I’m looking forward to hearing artitsts responses and their covers to our favorite Peter Gabriel songs.