Company

Founders

UnboundID was founded by experts and thought leaders who are internationally recognized for building world-class identity and access management software.

Steve Shoaff, CEO and Founder

Steve defines the vision and overall business strategy for UnboundID. He is internationally recognized as a trusted adviser on identity and security issues for Global 100 companies. At Sun Microsystems, he served as Technical Director and Chief of Staff for the Identity Management product division, as well as Director of Global Engineering and Support for the Directory Server Product Family. At Netscape Communications, he was Senior Product Manager for Directory and Security. He co-founded the OpenDS and SLAMD open source projects and performs technical due-diligence for venture capital firms. He has also been a key technical adviser to the US Department of Justice.

Don Bowen, Founder

Don Bowen lost a courageous battle with cancer in 2009. He was a leading expert in the field of identity and access management with more than 29 years of IT experience, the last 11 of those years focused on the identity space. He had extensive experience in consulting with Fortune 500 companies, helping them build and manage their marketing and product management activities for identity software and solutions. Prior to founding UnboundID, Don served as Distinguished Marketing Director and Director of Identity Integration at Sun Microsystems for their Identity Suite. He was also a Principal Consultant at Burton Group where he assisted major enterprises in defining and developing their identity and access management strategies. In addition, he was Chief Directory Architect at Caterpillar Inc. and led the architecture, design, and implementation of their global directory service and enterprise single sign-on (ESSO) capabilities. A co-founder of the OpenDS project, Don was a renowned speaker and panel member at many industry events.

David Ely, Chief Architect and Founder

A first-class software engineer, David excels at delivering high-quality products, both as a developer and a manager. Prior to co-founding UnboundID, David served at Sun Microsystems, where his talent and expertise were proven as a contributor and team leader for the development of highly-reliable, high-scale, secure, distributed applications. These applications centered on identity and access management within the enterprise and on the extranet. During his tenure at Sun, David also served as the engineering manager for OpenDS and as the technical lead for two products: Identity Manager Service Provider Edition and Identity Synchronization for Windows.

Neil Wilson, Principal Engineer and Founder

Neil Wilson has nearly ten years of experience in virtually all areas of directory services. Before co-founding UnboundID, Neil was the architect and lead developer of the OpenDS project at Sun Microsystems, Inc. While at Sun, he wrote a number of popular directory-related tools such as the SLAMD Distributed Load Generation Engine, MakeLDIF, and LDAPDecoder. He also designed the distribution mechanism for the Sun Java System Directory Proxy Server and worked to analyze and improve the performance and scalability of the Sun Java System Directory Server. He has strong real-world experience with a number of large directory deployments from his interactions with customers at Sun and from his previous position as lead technical support engineer for the iPlanet Directory Server at Netscape Communications. Prior to joining Netscape, Neil was a directory administrator at TidePoint Corp. and a web and directory server administrator at Caterpillar, Inc.