Background

Dick Hardt founded Sxip (pronounced: "skip") in October 2003 with a vision simplifying interactions with the web and focused on creating a simple, secure and open identity architecture that enables individuals to easily manage their online digital identities.

Sxip was conceived several years earlier while Dick was CEO of ActiveState, a leader in anti-spam technologies and tools for Open Source programming languages such as Perl, Python, Tcl and PHP. He recognized that the internet lacks an intrinsic identity mechanism – a single standard identity system for users to unambiguously identify who they are.

Enter the notion of “Identity 2.0”, an open, standards-based, yet fundamentally decentralized identity model. First coined by us in January 2005, Identity 2.0 describes the concept of an user-centric identity model that enables users to take their identity data from any site, and present it to any site. Soon to pass one million downloads, Dick's presentation on Identity 2.0 not only educated audience's about a future for digital identity, but the style has inspired other presenters.

To achieve an Identity 2.0 world, an open, standard protocol for moving around identity data is needed. Setting a new protocol is an arduous task, but the team was committed to making Identity 2.0 a reality. The company name was taken from Simple eXtensible Identity Protocol, of which several versions were shown to the world. Efforts were made to do the work in the IETF under DIX. Eventually a number of other user-centric approaches coalesced into OpenID 2.0, which has many of the features of the earlier protocol work.

Having established ourselves in the internet identity space, Sxip was approached by Salesforce.com to help them solve identity management for their customers. SaaS applications has to deal with identity in an internet context, and we saw hosted CRM being one of the first places where enterprises would need to deal with identity management at scale. We launched our Sxip Access product which was popular with Salesforce.com customers. Our success with Salesforce.com led to a partnership with Google for their SaaS applications, followed by a product that integrated identity management across both platforms. While this was a successful business, it became clear that it would be a long time before Identity 2.0 concepts would be embraced and we decided to exit the business, selling some of the assets to Ping Identity and the rest to TriCipher.

While working on establishing an internet identity protocol, we realized it would be a long time before it would be widely deployed. Enter Sxipper. A Firefox add-on that not only helps manage your OpenIDs, but also provides a similar one click experience for logging into websites with passwords and filling in forms. After exiting the enterprise software business and doing some corporate restructuring, Sxip is now focused on making the web simpler with Sxipper.