TriCipher acquires Sxip User Manager

14 April, 2008 - 2:51pm

Sxip is pleased to announce that TriCipher, Inc. has acquired Sxip User Manager. Sxip User Manager is a newly-released tool that allows administrators to provision and manage users in both Salesforce and Google Apps Premier from a single screen while enabling users to authenticate to both with the same username and password. After the sale of Sxip Access in February, the sale of Sxip User Manager is the final step allowing Sxip to focus on consumer solutions. The service will provide a complement to TriCipher's own identity management solutions. Read TriCipher's press release here

Sxip Access sold to Ping Identity

29 February, 2008 - 11:28am

Sxip is pleased to announce the sale of our Sxip Access business unit to Ping Identity

Sxip Access was launched 3 years ago to provide identity management for salesforce.com customers. We saw this as one of the first places enterprises were solving identity management issues in an internet context -- a precursor to Identity 2.0 solutions. Since that time, we added support for Google Apps and enjoyed the opportunity to contribute to the growth of the on-demand software market.

While developing Sxip Access, we were also bringing other solutions to market such as Sxipper which allows individuals to manage and protect their online identities. Finding ourselves managing two distinct businesses with different markets, it made sense to evaluate our focus.

While we believe in the enterprise market opportunity, Sxip decided to focus on consumer solutions. We were therefore excited by the interest from Ping to integrate Sxip Access with their own identity management solution, giving our customers an even more comprehensive identity management solution.

Read Ping’s press release here.

Northern Voice Blogging & Social Media Conference, eh!

18 February, 2008 - 4:09pm

Sxip is proud to be a sponsor again this year for Northern Voice and Moose Camp. Sold out for a fourth consecutive year, the event covers various aspects of social new media including blogging, podcasting, video blogging, and a new Internet Bootcamp. As a member of the organizing committee, I've found it a pleasure working with a very cool group of fellow Canucks on an awesome lineup of speakers including a keynote by Matt Mullenweg the founder of WordPress. Plus of course there will be great opportunities for social interaction with others including a kick off Tiki party. If you haven't already registered, sign up for our waiting list. Hope to see you here in beautiful British Columbia, the best place on earth!

OpenID Momentum

15 February, 2008 - 3:07pm

Following last week's exciting announcement of numerous tech heavyweights joining the OpenID Foundation, it's great to see the new board move so quickly with their first meeting this week (you can follow their activities on the mailing lists). New to the board are: Google's DeWitt Clinton, IBM's Tony Nadalin, Microsoft's Mike Jones, VeriSign's Gary Krall, and Raj Mata with Yahoo!. Sxip's founder and CEO, Dick Hardt is a community member of the board and is the treasurer as well as the co-chair of the marketing committee. With over 10,000 websites currently supporting OpenID and approximately 350 million OpenID log-ins, we look forward to seeing OpenID momentum build even faster with help from the new board members!

Identity 2.0 & Controlling Your Digital Representation

13 February, 2008 - 3:15pm

Interested in a forum for presenting and discussing state of the art thinking, research and practice around managing identity in the 21st Century? Hear Sxip's founder & CEO Dick Hardt at the Managing Identity in New Zealand Conference this spring. He and other internet luminaries will discuss the development and future directions of identity management (IdM), and its wider implications for users (with a particular focus on new digitized forms of IdM). Do you believe the future of IdM will be establishing user-centric IdM? Then join us in Wellington and contribute to the evolution of the Identity 2.0 discussion...

You are a directory entry? Why Identity 2.0 matters to MySQL

12 February, 2008 - 12:30pm

Are you just a directory entry? Much of the data in a database is about people, however with the lack of an identity system for the Web, it is very difficult for people to prove something about themselves online and hard for them to easily move their identity data. In this new version of Sxip CEO Dick Hardt's Who is the Dick on My Site? keynote, he will provide a background on Identity 2.0, discuss current roadblocks and future opportunities, and explore the potential impacts these will have on databases. Hope to see you at the MySQL conference in Santa Clara in April!

OpenID Gains Major Corporate Backing

7 February, 2008 - 2:53pm

It's great to see Identity 2.0 technologies like OpenID gain yet more traction with today's announcement by Microsoft, Google, IBM, Yahoo!, and VeriSign joining the board of the OpenID Foundation. The Foundation was formed last year by seven community members (including Sxip) with the goal of helping support and promote the technology developed by the OpenID community.

Cuesta College SSO to Gmail with Sxip

30 January, 2008 - 12:41pm

Cuesta College, a community college in the heart of California's scenic central coast, has solved their provisioning and single sign-on problem for Google Apps with Sxip Access. Janice House, Cuesta's Director of Computer Services stated, "we contacted some other identity management vendors, but Sxip was the only company that offered a simple solution for automation and SSO to Gmail, something we need for the constant overturn of 27,000 student accounts." Read more on Sxip Access' SSO, mobile support, and automated access control in the new Cuesta College Case Study.

Over half of North American Businesses to Use SaaS in 2008

25 January, 2008 - 4:13pm

Will this year be the tipping point for SaaS usage? New research from many analysts predict it. Saugatuck Technology states that by year end 55% of North American businesses will have deployed at least one Software-as-a-Service application. Similarly, by 2011 Gartner predicts SaaS will grow at double the rate of the total enterprise application market. And Forrester notes that the poster-child for SaaS, salesforce.com, is having a disruptive effect on the entire CRM market, suggesting that SaaS will comprise 25% of all new business software by 2011. With this growth however comes significant management and security challenges.

read more...

OpenID 2.0 Triples Adoption With Yahoo Support

17 January, 2008 - 5:47pm

Identity 2.0 got another boost today with Yahoo's announcement of support for OpenID 2.0. As one of the co-authors of the new OpenID 2.0 spec, we're delighted to see major internet portals like Yahoo with their 250 million user IDs, stand behind this emerging user-centric protocol. (For a great overview of OpenID 2.0's new capabilities see last month's ZDNet article, OpenID 2.0 Specification Released).

Identity breaches now over 200 million: losses doubled last year

9 January, 2008 - 4:44pm

The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse reports that identity data breaches as of January 5 have now reached over 215,000,000, more than double the amount reported as of January 5, 2007 of 100,000,000. Based on 2007 trends, it may well get worse. According to the Identity Theft Assistance Center, a non-profit coalition of major financial institutions, this year will bring more challenges for business and law enforcement with data security breaches growing in importance as a business issue. This is precisely why we need Identity 2.0, user-centric technologies that provide for greater privacy online.

Phishing for a decade: From Zero to $3 billion in 12 years

3 January, 2008 - 1:16pm

On this, the 12th anniversary of the first phishing attack it is dismaying to see phishing increasing not only in number to affecting in the US alone 3.6 million people at a cost of $3.2 billion, but also in new consumer and enterprise targets such as facebook and SaaS apps. This is precisely why we need Identity 2.0, with greater privacy and control for users online. Hopefully 2008 will see a reversal of this scary security trend, with the mainstream deployment of secure user-centric technologies such as Information Cards from identity selectors like Microsoft’s Windows CardSpace and Novell’s DigitalMe.

Trust 2.0: A Safe & Accountable Internet?

2 January, 2008 - 5:02pm

Identity, trustworthiness, a persistent reputation and accountability -- is it possible to have an online world that is safe? Sxip's founder & CEO Dick Hardt will discuss this in a new version of his infamously rapid fire keynote on "Trust 2.0" at the Second European Identity Conference. The IdM conference by Kuppinger Cole provides an unbiased source of new insights and ideas on a broad scale from business-oriented briefings to hands-on workshop sessions. Hope to see you in Munich in April!

OpenID 2.0 Finalized: User Centric Identity For Christmas

5 December, 2007 - 3:10pm

The internet community got an early Christmas present this morning, after more than 18 months of work the OpenID Authentication 2.0 and OpenID Attribute Exchange 1.0 were released today as final specifications (”OpenID 2.0") at the Internet Identity Workshop. Kudos to David Recordon, Josh Hoyt, and Sxip's Dick Hardt (three of the authors and editors)! There are already several open source libraries shipping these specifications with product support including Drupal and Google’s Blogger (via Sxip’s library). Multiple OpenID Providers including Sxipper also already have support for both of these specifications. Additional security extensions for phishing-resistant authentication are also available with PAPE. The finalization of the specs brings us one step closer to our Identity 2.0 vision of enabling individuals to create and manage their online digital identities. Find out more on OpenID.net.

Gartner: Phishing Attacks are Targeting SaaS Applications

4 December, 2007 - 4:54pm

Gartner has just published new research with similar findings to Sxip's Security Bulletin stating, "Targeted phishing attacks will increasingly focus on software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings that store large quantities of customer and business information" and that "users still are falling for phishing attacks, and the most dangerous of these are focusing on high value targets, like sales force automation and CRM systems." They recommend strong enterprise security programs for SaaS providers. We agree, however we suggest more advanced measures with no web form login by users, such as authentication with emerging Single Sign-On technologies like Information Cards, to substantially reduce the the phishing risk.

CRM Phishing - Brand Theft

30 November, 2007 - 2:51pm

Sxip's founder & CEO, Dick Hardt, has just published on his Identity 2.0 blog a posting on a disturbing new trend concerning enterprise phishing and on-demand applications. He notes, "Previously considered a threat for consumers, phishers are now targeting an enterprise’s customer list and using it to launch attacks against the enterprise customer - exploiting the enterprise brand." The effect this has on the compromised brands alone, (aside from the data and financial losses), is cause for concern -- as cited in a survey published earlier this week that found public confidence in consumer brands is dramatically affected by phishing attacks. Fortunately new phishing-resistant security measures can be undertaken using user-centric technologies such as Information Cards. Read our new Security Bulletin (pdf) to find out more, or join us as IIW next week, where this will be a topic for discussion.

Trust, Identity & Accountability On the Internet?

29 November, 2007 - 10:48am

A persistent reputation and accountability -- is it possible to have this online? Sxip's founder & CEO Dick Hardt will discuss this in a new version of his infamously rapid fire Identity 2.0 talk at the Internet Identity Workshop next week. He'll be speaking on trust and how user-centric technologies like OpenID, are necessary to bind identity to past behaviors to create an online world that is accountable, trustworthy and safe, and with users in control of their digital identity. The talk is Monday afternoon at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Hope to see you there!

SaaS Under Attack: Phishing for Your Customers

28 November, 2007 - 11:45am

The rise in enterprise on-demand application deployments has become a new and attractive target for phishers. As recently covered by CNET, Washington Post, eWeek and many others; phishers are employing multi-phased attacks that acquire enterprise customer contact data in order to launch further sophisticated assaults that exploit the trusted relationship between the enterprise and their customers. Thus, if you're using popular software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications for corporate email such as Google Apps, or for CRM such as Salesforce, you may be a target. Download our security bulletin (pdf) to gain a better understanding of the risks and the appropriateness of additional security measures.

Sxipper at Launch Party with a Twiist

21 November, 2007 - 6:17pm

Be among the first to see the latest release of Sxipper with his new privacy and security bells and whistles. We're demoing Sxipper at LAUNCH Party next month. Organized by the Valley's Twiistup and several Vancouver entrepreneurs, the event features local new media companies strutting their stuff and sharing their ideas with the community. Hope to see you at this fun-filled tech mixer on December 5!

Sxip on citizen-centric identity: IT Conversations podcast

19 November, 2007 - 12:57pm

Sxip's founder & CEO Dick Hardt recently had an in-depth discussion with Jon Udell of IT Conversations' Interviews with Innovators covering a host of digital identity issues including: the BC government's citizen-centric identity initiative, PKI, trust, privacy, biometrics, RFID, and more... Download this informative 45 minute technical overview of the Identity 2.0 vision and discover how phones will become the identity agents of the future.

Yahoo videocast on user-centric identity, Perl & Sxip

14 November, 2007 - 12:54pm

This 15 minute videocast with Sxip's founder and CEO and Yahoo Developer Network's Jeremy Zawodny at Defrag covers a lot of ground from Dick's open source roots to advocacy of user-centric identity. They discuss Dick's innovations over the past decade from leading the port of Perl to Windows in the mid-1990s with Microsoft, to being the first to build on the Mozilla platform with the Komodo IDE at ActiveState, to the creation of Identity 2.0 at Sxip. They concur on the state of user-centric identity being very much like the early days of the web (at the edge) with consumers just starting to become educated about the digital identity problem and solutions such as OpenID and CardSpace.

Defragging Identity 2.0

6 November, 2007 - 5:39pm

Our founder & CEO's latest Identity 2.0 keynote has generated some great comments regarding identity, trust, accountability and user-control on the web. Phil Windley of IT Conversations states, "much of what's he's saying is right in line with the reputation work my students and I have been working on. He makes a critical link to identity: identifiers bind personas together to increase trust." Dan Farber of CNET remarked, "His main thesis is that solutions, like OpenID, are necessary to “defrag” identity and bind it to past behaviors to create a world that is accountable, trustworthy and safe, and with users in control in a granular way of their online presence. Dick said the video would be available in a few weeks. Don't miss it." You bet! We'll post it as quickly as possible...

SSO to SuccessFactors Now Possible with Sxip Access

26 October, 2007 - 11:32am

Sxip Access now provides single sign-on and centralized user management for SuccessFactors in addition to other popular software-as-a-service applications such as Google Apps and Salesforce. This past summer, Sxip enabled a major North American energy producer with over 6000 employees to have secure and easy authentication for their users to SuccessFactors with our Virtual Appliances. Sxip Access was chosen over Microsoft ADFS, CA SiteMinder and RSA Federated Identity Manager as the only solution able to deliver a simple and proven identity management product for on-demand applications. Read more in our new SuccessFactors case study.

The Future of Facebook: Portable Social Networks

19 October, 2007 - 11:37am

Interested in seeing a more user-centric approach towards the identity data that Facebook stores? Could Facebook be the next killer app on the web if they were more than only somewhat open? Join us at the Facebook Developer Garage next week here in Vancouver. Our lead OpenID developer, Johnny Bufu will be on a panel with Boris Mann and others discussing how the extensions and protocols built around OpenID such as the attribute exchange in OpenID 2.0, can help with specific problems of data portability and user control that need to be solved by the social networks.

Identity 2.0 & Social Networks at PICNIC

11 October, 2007 - 2:00pm

Looking for some good videos on user-centric identity? Check out this "home movie style" video shot by Gabe McIntyre at the PICNIC conference last month in Amsterdam. The video is a panel on Portable Social Networks with discussion from the heads of Twitter, Jaiku, PeopleAggregator, Sxip, Hyves.nl, LinkedIn, XING and many others. They explore OpenID, user-centric identity, the problem of closed data silos and social media, how to lower the friction to participation on the web, Sxipper, and much much more. It's a bit long, but very informative. There's also a new iteration of Dick's infamous presentation (starts at 11 minute point). Catch up on the latest in Identity 2.0!

Identity 2.0 & Microsoft Developers

9 October, 2007 - 5:29pm

Join Sxip's founder & CEO Dick Hardt for a 30 minute podcast interview on digital identity with Microsoft's John Bristowe on the MSDN Developer Connection. Learn how user-centric identity enables developers in building Web 2.0 apps, improving conversions, limiting spam, and more! They also discuss the benefits of Identity 2.0 technologies such as OpenID, CardSpace, and Sxipper.