I attended a very thought-provoking Kuppinger Cole webinar last week, entitled, “SAML is Dead.  Long Live SAML,” featuring Craig Burton of Kuppinger Cole and Pam Dingle of Ping Identity.  It is now available as an on demand webcast.  My favorite slide addressed the sheer scale of what we are expecting to see in just a few years.

We are all familiar with big, complex operations now:

• Large enterprise Identity repositories:  hundreds of thousands
• Large mobile telephony user repositories: low hundreds of millions
• Large social media sites: high hundreds of millions

Adding addressable devices and the API’s to support those devices is mind boggling.

• Devices by 2015:  almost 3 billion
• API’s to support all those devices: almost 27 billion

Meeting that demand will take some real innovative technology and processes.  The webcast was certainly worth an hour of my time.  I highly recommend it to you.

This morning I enjoyed reading Craig Burton’s thought-provoking blog post, “The API Computing Magic Troika and the API Economy.” The post centers on:

Three core things that make the Intention Economy work. …

• Cloud-based code
• Cheap telephony-data
• Personal Data Technology

I will not attempt to summarize or paraphrase Craig’s characteristically-lucid commentary, but recommend that you read it.  Please also take a few minutes and read the Programmable Web article Craig mentions, about the accelerating growth of public API’s.

I was particularly intrigued by Craig’s closing comment, echoing a view I have held for years:

Digital Identity is core to all this stuff.

Well said, Craig.