CSO

I had an interesting early morning conversation today with Andre Durand, CEO of Ping Identity (full disclosure: Andre's a close friend and was my boss for a time. I still hold a small equity stake in Ping Identity.) Andre was talking about some chatter he's heard recently surrounding, "is identity management a market?"

The question is interesting because it highlights something that's always been true with regards to identity: identity is, but people implement things that do. Put another way, NO ONE decides to implement an identity system (no matter how large or small it is) for its own sake. People implement identity because it helps them do something else.

That something "else" might be an increased networking of business processes, an increase in business transaction speed, compliance, securing an application or business process flow (or any number of things), but that something else isn't ever "let's implement identity, so we can have identity."

That "rub" lies at the heart of "problems" around things like OpenID adoption. Sure, there's lots of OpenID adoption, but there isn't a lot of usage. Conversely, something like Facebook Connect has taken off because it's about *doing* something else. It's almost an unfair comparison, as Facebook's "closed network" status gives it a lot of inherent advantages. But it's still a useful theoretical distinction to understand.

As we move forward with content planning for Digital ID World (Sept 14-16, Vegas baby!), my main focus is to get the agenda focused on what identity can or will do. The "will do" (future tense) might be the most interesting part.

Identity's first wave (roughly 2001-2008) was all about building the noun that is "identity." Identity's second wave (projected - 2009 to 2016) will be all about building the verbs that live on top of identity. Riding that wave means that every vendor out there needs to start focusing not on identity, but rather on the applications that utilize identity.