I’ve been involved with computers for decades. In the early 90s while in high school I started a company making websites for local car dealerships in the Pittsburgh area. In college I worked at the Penn State helpdesk, was one of the original members of the Penn State Linux User Group, and worked for a local computer store selling and repairing computers.

I eventually started working for Penn State full time as a mainframe operator. Working 3rd shift I spent my time reading all of the IBM s/390 manuals and playing with Linux on a spare computer in the machine room. After a few months I was hired as a mainframe systems programmer in 2000 and was responsible for os/390 (later zOS) operating system upgrades, developing middleware software for managing the communications between the student portals and back end student information systems and installing and maintaining Linux on the mainframe.

Several years later Penn State formed an Emerging Technologies group taking several members from the student computing group, administrative computing group, and telecommunications group. As part of this group, I led several identity management initiatives including developing and deploying a unified web single sign on system, the first federated single sign on system (Shibboleth – where we ran the first production instance of the identity provider on my work desktop Redhat 7.3 machine), and a federated peer to peer file sharing system for academic use with access controls and a comprehensive permission system.

In 2006 I was hired by an identity management consulting company called Entology. There I focused on Oracle Identity Access Manager and Oracle Identity Manager and was responsible for several of the largest and most successful deployments, helping Entology win the Oracle Titan Award several years in a row. In 2008 Entology was acquired by PriceWaterhouse Coopers and I stayed on for 3 years continuing to lead successful Oracle Identity Management implementation projects.

In 2011 I joined with two of my former principal consultants from Entology to form Identity Works LLC, an identity and access management consulting firm which we grew into a successful company currently partnering with out clients to provide implementation expertise with Oracle, Sailpoint, Okta, and MidPoint identity management software as well as guidance in high level identity and access management program planning, software selection, and long term security and cloud strategy.