About

Currently: Gazitt Advisory - identity, access, and AI
Standards: OpenID AuthZEN (founding co-chair);
OASIS (early 2000s)
Previously: Co-founder & CEO, Aserto · CPO, Puppet · VP/GM, HP · GM, Microsoft

I'm Omri Gazitt. 35 years in product, engineering, architecture, and executive leadership - mostly focused on developer and infrastructure platforms, with the last few years working on modern identity & access.

I started my career as the founding engineer of NEON Systems, which went public in 1999, and where I learned all about the power of standards like TCP/IP and ODBC. I then spent thirteen years at Microsoft, on the founding teams for .NET (data, XML, SOAP, WS-*, WCF, WF, and the entire middle-tier .NET stack); SQL Server; and later Azure (Access Control Service, Workflow Service, Service Bus, AppFabric).

After that, I led the cloud native platform BU at HP where I got involved with open source - OpenStack; Cloud Foundry (where I was a board member); and CNCF. I led product & engineering at Puppet, and most recently was co-founder / CEO of Aserto, a modern authorization company, and the creator of Topaz, an open source authorization engine that combines the best ideas from OPA and Zanzibar.

The through line - creating the software and protocol stack that developers use to build modern applications.

In 2026 I started Gazitt Advisory, working with clients on the intersection of identity, authorization, and AI. I was a founding co-chair of the OpenID AuthZEN working group until January 2026, and was the primary editor of its Authorization API 1.0 specification.

This site is where I think out loud about how AI is forcing change in the modern identity & access stack and specs. The primary places this work shows up publicly is in the OpenID AuthZEN community, and as Internet-Draft; the drafts live on GitHub, and disagreements are best filed there as issues or pull requests.