I’ve been following Matt Flynn’s Identity Management Blog for the past few months, and I’ve enjoyed reading his views on the many questions and issues that surround the IAM space. The security community tends to be a very small world, but that doesn’t stop people from mixing it up now and then. Nonetheless I get the sense most of these folks could spend an entire afternoon in a spirited debate, then have no problem sharing dinner and drinks afterward.

In today’s entry, Matt makes mention of the value CoreBlox can bring with our managed identity services offerings. He’s also kind enough to give us kudos for our approach:

“One of the things I like about this is that CoreBlox isn’t trying to provide a support professional for any identity system. They’re focused on the technologies that they know.”

Granted there are many principles of IAM that would apply to any product suite, and we’ve shown we can be versatile enough to gain expertise in other areas such as federation and directory virtualization. But no one at CoreBlox will deny that SiteMinder is our bread & butter, and will continue to be a main area of focus for us on the services side of the business.

Lately the CoreBlox team has been making a push to be more visible and interactive with our Facebook user base, our colleagues in the Identity & Access Management (IAM) space, and the social networking community at large. Some of the new places you’ll find a CoreBlox presence include:

• @CoreBlox on Twitter for miscellaneous company updates
  
• @IHaveKids on Twitter for updates about our Facebook application and links to useful parenting articles and resources
  
• CoreBlox on GetSatisfaction for handling any questions or comments related to CoreBlox in general
  
• IHaveKids on GetSatisfaction for handling questions or comments related to our Facebook application
• SSOhelp.com, a social community we created for problem solving related to SiteMinder, Radiant Logic, and any other IAM solutions

Based on this excellent post from Joel Postman of Socialized, I learned that merely establishing a presence isn’t enough. According to Joel, we should:

“Explain why you are on Twitter and who is responsible for your company’s presence there. Consumers want to talk to a ‘real person,’ and not a bot.”

The short answer to the ‘why’ is that we want to network and grow our business, and we’re convinced that the way we’re going to get maximum traction with anything we do (especially our social apps) is to be as visible and accessible as possible.

As for the ‘who’: I’ll be handling most of our social web interactions for CoreBlox with some much needed assistance from my colleague Dave Saraiva. In addition to maintaining the CoreBlox presence, Dave & I are both on Twitter talking about our kids, music, sports, and the things we’re passionate about in our daily CoreBlox lives.

Our investment in a social presence is already paying dividends. Earlier this week our I Have Kids application was featured in the popular mommy blog MommyGoggles.com. Yesterday I was thrilled to receive this tweet from Mass High Tech, a popular and well-respected regional trade journal:

If you’re out there reading this and haven’t done so already, please take a moment to connect with us! Hopefully this post has erased any questions you had about how to do so.

Seven years ago when I was working for Onyx Software, I led a CRM implementation for a Waltham, MA based company called Netegrity. Netegrity had made an early arrival to the Identity & Access Management (IAM) party, and its SiteMinder solution for single sign-on (SSO) had been wildly successful with Fortune 500 companies. About a year later when I was looking to reduce my travel load and get a view of the CRM world from the other side, I joined Netegrity’s Business Systems group where I began working with my fellow CoreBlox co-founders. Three years later CA acquired Netegrity, and shortly after that we launched CoreBlox.

Normally I would end that last paragraph with “And the rest is history…”, but it’s important to recognize a major component that has allowed our start-up to defy the odds and celebrate three years as a self-funded business: SiteMinder. There’s no doubt that having a strong, smart, versatile team has been a key to our success, but it would be difficult to pursue our Web 2.0 initiatives (such as our I Have Kids app which is up to 60,000 users!) if we were unable to find consistent sources of revenue to fund them. Our team’s SiteMinder expertise has allowed us to establish ourselves as a boutique firm in a niche market, and it has opened doors in other spaces such as directory virtualization and SAML/federation. In a down economy, IAM spending has remained strong enough to provide us with the engagements we need to drive our business forward:

“… the number of organizations planning to roll out identity and access management solutions in the next 12 to 18 months increased 11 [percentage points], moving from 49 percent in 2006 to 60 percent in 2008.“

As with any product or service that one works with on a daily basis, it’s easy to focus on gaps and frustrations. Sometimes we need to step back and recognize that what makes the solution complex leads to the opportunities that those who know it well can enjoy.

So on behalf of the entire CoreBlox team, I’d like to offer a sincere THANK YOU to SiteMinder. May you continue to send great opportunities and clients our way!

Well, I am back from the SSO Summit. It was a good conference with some interesting information. I presented on “Identity Integration” and why you need to focus on understanding your user base prior to beginning SSO projects. I uploaded a PDF version of the slides I used:

identity-integration-the-key-to-successful-sso

- Todd

There is little doubt that a small company’s success in the Web 2.0 world depends on the quality of the solutions it builds. Bring a sub-par solution to market and chances are you’ll quickly find yourself back at the drawing board trying to come up with a new idea. If you need proof, just have a look at all the solutions that ended up in the TechCrunch Deadpool.

Of course there are other success factors at work beyond solution quality, and one of them is name/brand recognition. It’s a timeless marketing question that existed long before Web 2.0 - how do I get my name and my solution out there for the world to see? (After all, one could argue that ending up in the Deadpool isn’t so bad because at least you got to TechCrunch in the first place.)

Recently CoreBlox made a concerted effort to let people know about our I Have Kids Facebook application. We started donating money to charity on behalf of our user base; we launched a campaign on the Facebook ad network; we launched a support site on GetSatisfaction.com; we even created a Twitter account where you can follow our application and some of the interesting kid-focused news articles we find. The results have been very positive, as our user base has grown to over 40,000 users from all over the world who have rewarded us with a 5-star application rating. In a Facebook application world where often the most popular applications allow you to Superpoke your friends or turn them into zombies, we’ve manged to find a niche with our “serious” app.

But sometimes the best kind of publicity is the stuff you don’t expect. Take what happened to us yesterday when a friend who was attending Facebook’s f8 event happened to notice a familiar logo on the presentation screen during Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote address. We were fortunate in that photographer Brian Solis was able to get an excellent capture of the moment:

(CC) Brian Solis, www.briansolis.com and bub.blicio.us.

Take a look just to the left of the pink ribbon near the center of the screen and you’ll see our bright blue & white CoreBlox logo.

Zuckerberg’s keynote emphasized that Facebook will reward applications that provide the most value, so we’re confident that our I Have Kids community will continue to grow in the coming months. In the meantime, thanks to all our 40,000+ users who helped CoreBlox to play a role in the f8 event!