Dick Hardt

Who is Dick Hardt?

Dick Clarence Hardt is the founder and CEO of Sxip Identity. He is an advocate of Identity 2.0.

Hardt has spoken at tech events such as Web 2.0, Supernova, Digital ID World, ETech, OSCON, PICNIC, International World Wide Web Conference, ISOC, Anti-Phishing Working Group, at New York University, Harvard and many other locales. He's been interviewed extensively and has been cited in numerous publications including Wired.

Prior to Sxip, Hardt founded ActiveState in 1997. Under his leadership as CEO, ActiveState became a leader in tools for open source programming languages and anti-spam software and was acquired by UK-based security company, Sophos, in 2003 for $23 million.

Hardt claims to have made the original port of the Perl programming language to Windows in the mid-1990s, which was highly controversial in the open source community. In 1999, ActiveState signed a contract to add features previously missing from Windows ports of Perl.

On December 9, 2008 Hardt announced that he was joining Microsoft as a Partner Architect and will be working on consumer, enterprise and government identity problems. While at Microsoft he would continue to be on the board of Sxipper Inc., maintaining the Sxipper product originally started at Sxip Inc. On his webblog at dickhardt.org Mr. Hardt indicated that January 15, 2010 was his last day at Microsoft. Sxip and Sxipper have now been shut down as it was no longer economical to run. However he did indicate he would think of making the code available online possibly for someone to revive it and give Sxipper a new lease on life.