After more than 8 years at Kentor the time as come to move on. I’m leaving Kentor and starting my own business. I will continue to work with identity and access management, especially SAML2 on .NET. I will do consulting, open source development and training, both on site and remotely. The Kentor.AuthServices project will be transferred to my new company, Sustainsys
I started at Kentor in April 2009. During those 8½ years I’ve learnt a lot, advancing from being one of a few hundred “Consultants” to becoming one of 30-something “Senior Consultants” and finally becoming one of four “Chief Consultants” in the company. During those years I’ve both had successes with the teams I’ve been part of and experienced failures that I’ve learnt from. I’ve had the chance to see a variety of projects, customers and technologies.
But one thing I’ve always been the one doing in all the projects: Identity and Access Management. That eventually brought me into the world of SAML2 and federations and further to OpenID Connect and IdentityServer. I started the Kentor.AuthServices project as a small SAML2 module for .NET and it has now grown to become a SAML2 stack supporting a multitude of deployment scenarios.
Kentor has been a great place to work at and I’m happy to have spent 8 years there. But during the time I’ve seen things that I would have done differently. Now is the time for me to try that out, by going independent I can try out my ideas and see if they work.
One of the things I will do differently is to have more focus on open source software. I want to see how far the work with Kentor.AuthServices can take me. The project will be brought over to Sustainsys and renamed (if you have an opinion on the name, please [join the discussion]( The project will continue to be open source and I will offer sponsored development for adding new features as well as support services for setting it up.
The name Sustainsys is a reference to Sustainable Systems which is an important part of forming a sustainable future. We all need to do our part to address climate change, pollution and social injustice. Sustainsys is a commercial company in the IT business, but still, every single decisions that we make have an environmental impact. At Sustainsys I want that impact to be weighted in, to be part of every decision.
I also want to explore my ideas of what makes a consulting company sustainable. Once eager startups, driven by people’s enthusiasm many companies end up as sleepy dragons, focusing on growing and delivering revenue to a distant owner. That does not make sense to me. A product company having invested heavily in an invention has a value in itself. But a consulting company is nothing without the consultants. There is very little value in the company itself, the value is the people choosing to work for the company. If the value is the employees, I think that should be reflected in the ownership structure: a company owned by the employees.
I want more people to join Sustainsys and I want to make everyone working there part of the company, with an equal ownership share. As long as you are working at Sustainsys you are an owner, once you leave you have to hand your share back. The best ideas are not brought forward by a single mind, they are born from people with different perspective discussing and forming an idea together. That is how I want Sustainsys to be. If you are located in Stockholm and interested in hearing more about joining me on this adventure, please get in touch.
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