I finally had a chance to sit down this week and reflect on a spectacular API conference the 3Scale team put on a few weeks ago.

The crew at 3Scale, led by Steve Willmott, CEO and founder, pulled together some of the best talent in the industry to help spread knowledge about the API business, promote good practices and extend the community of vendors, experts and customers. The event and its goals remind me a lot of the Cloud Identity Summit that Ping puts on each summer.

The 3Scale conference, API Strategy and Practice, covered a lot of territory across a wide range of domains including media, commerce, travel, retail, finance, government, education and more.

Ping's Paul Madsen was among many of the speakers and his presentation, "OAuth 2.0 Plays Well With Others" was a great hit. For video of the presentation click on the title in the previous sentence;  but I warn you that you'll want a prescription for OAuth once you view it.

Paul also participated in a panel with Vordel, Iron.io and Intel. The panelists focused on the challenges of security and scalability as APIs gain adoption and become an ever more critical gateway to an organization's core business.

A very apparent challenge many face is the lack of knowledge and experience around security that API developers face as they expose API services. Many are going back to what they understand, which is username and password, and haven't realized how simple standards-based identity and application security solutions are to integrate with their solution.  

Suffice it to say, there are many views on how to best address the API challenge, but all agreed that API security greatly benefits from standards-based integration with identity and access management systems.

As for me, I represented Ping as a Gold sponsor at the event, and also hosted a cocktail hour for attendees. I was happy to see we even got a shout out from Kin Lane, API Evangalist for CityGrid, when he noticed that we had IPA among the beer choices at an API conference.

All in all, I was overwhelmed with the positive conversations about Ping's participation in the event and encouraged by the many connections we made with new and existing partners and customers. Looking forward to working with these customers and partners to deliver highly secure and simple services to the market.

Many thanks to the 3Scale team and the many participants that made the event meaningful and a great success. I can't wait to see many of our new friends at the Cloud Identity Summit this summer as we continue the conversation.

And by the way, just a few days ago, the press release went out announcing open registration and the initial lineup of workshops, sessions, featured speakers and sponsors for the Cloud Identity Summit 2013, taking place July 8-12 at the Meritage Resort and Spa in Napa, Calif.

I especially like seeing the quote from Kuppinger Cole analyst Dave Kearns, suggesting that "If you're involved with identity - or security - you need to be at Cloud Identity Summit."