Conversation with Sean Harris of PassLogix

I was eager to meet up Sean Harris of PassLogix at the Worldwide Partner Conference. Security and identity management have been issues that have continuously plagued the IT world…seemingly forever. Sean is the Vice President of Sales for PassLogix and is on the front lines of working with enterprises to solve the most vexing security issue: password management.

Here is a quick recap of our conversation:

What is PassLogix?

PassLogix has developed software that takes away the need for users to manage their own usernames and passwords. Aside from the fact that remembering twelve passwords is an enormous hassle, most people tend to create a security vulnerability for their company by using one simple word as their password, and then never changing it. PassLogix helps clients to ensure that their enterprise level password strength is strong, lower help desk calls (by eliminating the need for users to remember any passwords) and even integrating password management with card readers at the desktop level.

PassLogix was started in 1996 and has 23 million users. Their software can be implemented by companies of any size from small businesses to large enterprises like Kaiser Permanente, HSBC and the US Post Office. Being size agnostic and complete scalable, PassLogix is seeing increasing demand as companies are embracing the cloud and using a combination of local applications as well as those served over the Internet.

How long have you been a Microsoft Partner?

PassLogix is a long time Microsoft Partner. However, in the past year and a half, that relationship has grown markedly stronger. PassLogix has developed strategic relationships with most identity management software vendors. Microsoft recently rolled out Microsoft Forefront, a identity management solution that provided us a opportunity to seamlessly integrate our product with theirs.

What do you think of WPC 2010?

While we were here last year, this is the first time we have been in a booth. It is a fantastic opportunity to network with our Microsoft contacts- some of whom we’d only spoken to on the phone! It is great for relationship building to put faces to people’s names. We are also excited to meet and learn about other Microsoft partners. For example, we have had numerous conversations around how to integrate identity management into the Unified Access Gateway environment. We’ll be working with Microsoft’s other UAG partners to ensure that as companies continue to embrace the cloud they won’t expose themselves to security vulnerabilities.

(This post originally appeared on Microsoft Partner News)