This week I was awarded Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for Enterprise Mobility for my work in the area of Identity and Access Management.
This is quite an honor and something I had never considered as for the majority of my professional career I’ve been employed by integrators that require all my work to be considered intellectual property that must not be shared publicly. I’ve always appreciated what others have shared within my specialist domain and always felt a little guilty that I wasn’t able to reciprocate.
Two years ago (to the day of receiving the MVP award) I joined the Australian based integrator Kloud Solutions. The culture within Kloud is quite different to my previous employers where supporting our technical communities is encouraged. After finding my feet at Kloud and getting my work-life balance back after coming out of a Global Research & Development role I started contemplating sharing some of my knowledge and experiences with Identity and Access Management especially as I was undertaking interesting projects that were integrating traditional identity management systems with Cloud services.
That was when I started blogging, presenting in a couple of forums as well as starting to leverage a number of open source tools and services. Around mid-year I was nominated for MVP and it was at that time I appreciated the time and effort required to qualify. In Australia we are well endowed with IDM MVP’s and I’m very honored and humbled to join Bob Bradley, Carol Wapshere and Ryan Newington.
I’m still amazed that after 20+ years of experience with Identity and Access Management the projects I’m doing still incorporate new technologies, services and are interesting. Integration of Cloud Services, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning with identity solutions are all exciting areas that have an identity management aspect to them.
A big thank you to Kloud for the support to give back to the IDAM community, fellow IDAM MVP’s for entertaining my sometimes bespoke thoughts on integrating their tools and my family for the many nights I’ve sat in front of a computer writing up the latest post or presentation.