My foray into identity actually began at Jabber in 2001, after writing an internal memo on the significance of Microsoft Passport.

The notion of an internet-scale identity system captured my imagination then, and it hasn't let go since. Several years into the development of the identity meta-system, we're on the cusp of identity 'dial-tone' for the Internet.

Yesterday Google announced the Google Marketplace, a way for SaaS vendors to allow their users to authenticate to Google and then access their applications via single sign-on and the OpenID protocol. Google as an Identity Provider to the identity disenfranchised makes a ton of sense, as does the notion that your email is essentially as close a proxy for your 'identity on the internet' as anything else.

In the grand landscape, identities will enter the 'cloud' from many places, some from the enterprise directory, some from corporate portals, some from partner/customer portals, some from hosted IdPs (like Google). Ping exists to provide technologies and on-demand offerings which connect to these existing and new identity systems to move identity from point A with point B in whatever combination they are arranged. We like to think of ourselves as the Cisco of identity routers. Plumbing for making connections.

Our market is about to move into overdrive, as enterprise, consumer, prosumer and mobile use-cases begin to connect into one incredible ecosystem of the identity-aware Internet.

Exciting times, but I sense the starting bell has only now been rung.