Mark Wilcox Adds Directory and Federated Identity Distinctiveness to OctetString; Early LDAP evangelist and best-selling author joins virtual directory technology pioneer as Technical Product Manager

Business Wire, Oct 4, 2005

SCHAUMBURG, Ill. -- OctetString (www.octetstring.com), one of the pioneers in virtual directory technology, announced today that Mark Wilcox has joined the company in a newly created position as Technical Product Manager. The company expects that Wilcox's extensive experience in the practical deployment of Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), Single Sign-On, and federated identity management technologies will enhance its ability to assist large and mid-size enterprises with managing user IDs more effectively and efficiently.

"Mark is someone who has been very visible in the ID management space over the last few years," said Clayton Donley, founder and CTO of OctetString. "He is one of the few people in the industry who has real-world, large-scale project experience to go along with his theoretical knowledge. That familiarity will make him invaluable to our customers who are struggling with many of the issues he's already solved. We are happy to have Mark as part of the OctetString team."

In addition to product management duties, OctetString plans to share Wilcox's knowledge and experience via special platforms on the OctetString Web site, such as a blog or a discussion forum, according to Donley. Wilcox joins OctetString from WebCT, Inc., where he was Senior Solutions Architect. During his time there he was lead developer for the authentication facility in the company's Learning Management System (LMS), which serves more than one million students worldwide. As part of that role, he led numerous Single Sign-on implementations, including those with Shibboleth (federated identity management from Internet2), CAS, and Netegrity. He also participated in the development of Shibboleth and Web Initial Sign-on specifications, and developed the first publicly available pure-Java Shibboleth service provider implementation. He began his career at the University of North Texas as an enterprise Web applications architect.

Wilcox is well-suited to the information-sharing part of his role. He wrote Implementing LDAP, which was consistently ranked as the top selling book on LDAP, and co-authored 15 other books including Professional Java Server Programming and Professional JSP Programming. Other accomplishments include presenting at the Shibboleth Boot Camp Conference in 2004, speaking on directory services and authentication at ApacheCon U.S. from 2000 to 2002, and running an LDAP tutorial at the 2000 O'Reilly Open-Source Conference.

"There has been a lot of hype and misinformation in the identity management space," Wilcox said. "I hope to use my background and experience to break through that and give OctetString's customers a realistic, pragmatic approach to solving their identity issues. I also want to use it to further the great work OctetString has begun, and continue to give our customers virtual directory software that is easy to use, stable and functionally rich."

About OctetString, Inc.

OctetString (www.octetstring.com) provides light-weight directory service solutions for large companies that need to access identities from multiple repositories and share data among numerous applications and platforms without compromising data integrity or incurring additional infrastructure costs. OctetString's flagship software suite, Virtual Directory Engine (VDE), accelerates deployment of secure business applications by simply and dynamically connecting and transforming available information among internal systems. Companies efficiently add new capabilities using existing systems as leverage and accelerate the return on their investments in enterprise applications. OctetString serves an international clientele, including BP America, Novartis, Motorola, Pfizer, the German, Czech and Norwegian Governments, United States Department of Defense, United States Department of Justice, Bayer, Boeing, Schering and Bunge. OctetString is based in Schaumburg, Illinois. Reach OctetString toll-free in North America at 866.868.8882, International callers dial 1 847.358.9358.