Back from 3 Days at IBM Labs Australia

Just came back from 3 days at IBM’s Tivoli Labs on the Gold Coast - and had a great time - even though it was unbelievably hot up there. It was great to meet the guys up there who have just shipped Tivoli Access Management (TAM) 6. But what I was really excited to see was the very cool culture that they have build up there - very casual but with tons of young smart people having fun and doing great work.

I was up there getting a briefing on what IBM have been up to in the Federated Identity area with their various FIM and TAM products. Had a good chance to write some code to integrate WebSEAL with a client’s internal Java identity management software - and it was awesome to be able to talk to they guys that are actually working on the source base. It’s pretty cool to have access to vendor people who can say, “I’ll just check it in the source and see how that bit’s implemented”. Great stuff.

I was really inspired for my own dreams in the ISV space. It is so doable - and people up the road from me have done it! (the guys in the Labs were acquired from a small startup of 20-sometings about 7 years ago). Very pumped.

Anyways, looks like I’ll have a chance to play with a whole bunch of IBM Java identity and access management stuff in ‘06 - and it’s great to have the contacts to be able to follow up with the guys actually building the products.