I’ve had many conversations with Dave Kearns over the years in hallways, a few beer halls, and conference panel discussions at events like the Internet Identity Workshop and the European Identity Conference. The conversations have been lively and often pushed my thinking in new directions. We’ve followed a similar path from the directory services of the 90s to Internet identity systems, and now on to cloud computing as it accelerates the adoption of identity services and the identity provider model.

In a recent newsletter Dave riffs on my presentation at the European Identity Conference and then concludes with this paragraph:

“The cloud is a reality. Cloud-based computing is a reality. Platform-as-a-service, application-as-a-service and, yes, identity-as-a-service will soon be as pervasive as client-server computing became in the last century. This will mean fundamental changes in the ways we think about identity and security. Get on that train, or be left at the station.”

Dave, well said.

And the journey continues.