Google made it official last night that OpenID has warmed up to near the boiling point. Google turned up the heat by declaring itself an OpenID identity provider (IDP) as part of its newly introduced Google Apps Marketplace, a venue for acquiring applications that integrate into Google Apps. See more on Marketplace at Chris Ceppi's blog. OpenID and OAuth will work in tandem to provide single sign-on to third-party applications that are OpenID relying parties. In fact, the recommendation from Google is that application developers simply provide a button that says "Sign in using a Google Apps account" instead of presenting a log-in box. (There is more information here about Google's federated login. ) What's significant, however, is that identity and the cloud are racing to the alter, and that Google has the potential to scale to IDP heights never seen before. It has 25 million users already on its Google Apps platform. And hours before Google pulled OpenID further into the limelight, NTT DoCoMo, Japan's largest mobile provider with half the country's population – some 65 million people -- began offering OpenID authentication. And just over a week ago, Japan started accepting OpenID's on its IdeaBox site run by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. The list of OpenID supporters includes Yahoo!, LiveJournal, Blogger, flickr, Orange, mixi, WordPress and AOL. And OpenID providers include chi.mp, ClaimID, myID.net, myOpenID, Verisign Labs, and Your Internet ID (Yiid). The picture is becoming clear that OpenID will command a spot in the identity architecture and as the basis for valid identity use cases. See Ping CEO Andre Durand's thoughts on the starting gun that just went off. Google only wants to be an OpenID IDP and not an identity federation hub outside the cloud. The truth is that OpenID is additive. There is still a need to integrate identity needs in the cloud with what enterprises have built internally and with B2B partners on the back of SAML-based access control. Google understands that fact and so should users. Google is recommending that Marketplace users who want SSO that ties in other authentication and authorization implementations in both the cloud and the enterprise should go to the likes of MyOneLogin, RPX and Ping. What needs to be filled is the gap between Google as an OpenID provider and applications with different access control implementations. Ping Federate, for example, includes connectors for platforms such as SharePoint, .Net, WebLogic, Siteminder, NetWeaver, and to open source tools based on PHP and Apache. In addition, it supports integration with x.509 and LDAP implementations. Last month, Ping stepped up its commitment to OpenID when it joined the board of the OpenID Foundation and appointed industry veteran Pam Dingle to be its representative. While a degree of OpenID support has been in Ping's products for some time, it is now working its way into the front seat along side SAML. And there is more to come with OpenID.