No Jackson is another one who receives the award. Jackson will do the lation, which does not mean that he wouldn't be a candidate, but he's, he's younger than he looks with his gray hair. So thank you, Jackson.
You know, Martin and the team asked me to do this. And of course at the time, Martin says you have three to five minutes to talk about someone's lifetime achievement. And I, but I thought, wow, that's a challenge. And then he introduces other people and says, you have one to two minutes to do this. So I'm gonna take my time. I know that I'm between, you know, dinner and you know, the festivities, but this deserves a couple of minutes. And, and this is very personal for me. In 1990, I got to work on a project that reduced cost in the company I worked for by two orders of magnitude. So a quarter of a million dollars cost to $2,500. I saw some software. That to me was amazing. I, I, I got on the phone and called my boss in Nairobi, Kenya. He was there at the time doing a, a, a deployment and said, you know, you've gotta see this.
It's, it's one of the most amazing things I've seen. And that started, you know, an amazing relationship. And a few years later, 1993, I joined the company of, of this gentleman. And it, it, you know, just for me to see the influences that have occurred with some of the people, you know, in the industry, that you may know some of these names, you may not know some of them, but leaders like Dean Palmero from Banon Jim Chen, who used to be a group vice president at Microsoft, but at the time was VP of engineering at Banon Tim house, the LDAP standard, the LDAP directory from university of Michigan in the Netscape, great involvement and, and sway and direction with the NA the network applications, consortium companies like Becktel. I mean, even companies that today I still talk to and they still talk about those days, Nike sprint caterpillar. I'll never forget seeing my colleague getting an order from the us Marine Corps and a discussion about his software and them saying to him, don't forget, we're armed. You are not. So it was very clear that things had to work, you know, in 1996, something amazing happened.
He presented the meta directory concept and the, and the directory join and the identity join at Burton group 96 in Colorado Springs. Craig was there, a number of us were there to me, was the start of a whirlwind, a whirlwind of amazing, you know, evolution of identity management before, you know, we even talked about what that word was and meta directory and, you know, influence with, and by people like Craig and Judith and Jamie Lewis and doc circles. I was just remembering tonight that seem, I recall having beers on a, on a, on a back porch someplace with, you know, having all kinds of crazy discussions, Jamie Lewis, of course, Phil Zimmerman, David Goodman, the people that he has influenced is, is, is endless, you know, in 1999, a company that I didn't even know where they were based, showed up at his door and said, we'd like to acquire you.
I had to look up where, where, where Microsoft was based. You know, the tornado started, I got to witness a gentleman who could sit there and have a discussion as a peer with someone like bill gates and do amazing things, you know, reach a distinguished engineer status, interact with the, you know, European union, Robert Scoble, Andre Duran, all kinds of people, all kinds of luminaries. You know, I saw amazing things where a ship, the course of a ship was corrected multiple times. And Craig and I were talking about that earlier today. Things like adopting the SAML two protocol, you know, all of the things. I mean, I'll never forget a meeting. I was in one time where some people were talking about how they were gonna build an L DAP directory that had no security controls on it. And the discussion that followed that was amazing because you know, our, our lifetime achievement awardee has such a way around him to teach people and enable them to understand the problems.
Sometimes that it's, it's truly amazing. And, you know, I, I left Microsoft in 2005 and I've taken a lot of learnings and I use them, you know, from, from our man quite a lot. And you don't need to look through a set of, in oculars to see the influence he's had at Microsoft and the influence he's had in the world of identity and access management of privacy and security. You know, he once said, and I truly believe in this in heaven, there will be no PKI. I, I hope that that comes true. The opposite of course, is that in hell, if you do go there, guess what you get to work on all day. So, so with that, just as a great personal, you know, opportunity for me, and also to, you know, from a professional perspective to introduce the lifetime achievement award envelope, please should be hard to, to, to,
We do, like we had, it should be hard to add up who this would be. Yeah. I think it's really very, very, where is he here? Here you go for this. Great. You're welcome, Kim, the lady first.
Thank you. Thank you.
So picture exactly. Okay. Thank you. You can go there and also say some words. Thank you, tracking.
Well, I really don't know what to say. Thank you very much. Thanks to everybody in the room. So many friends here, I feel overwhelmed.
Okay. Okay.
