After 4 years of painstaking (and occasionally painful) collaboration among industry competitors, we are a few weeks away from launching OpenID Connect at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, in Tokyo via OpenID Foundation Japan and Mobile World Congress in Barcelona with the GSMA. This is an important milestone in the evolution of online identity providing an open standard enabling global interoperability. More simply said, this helps move us away from the use of passwords. And in light of yet more breaches, the sooner the better.
Standards are as strong as the sum of those that adopt them. OpenID Connect has been and will be adopted by Internet leaders worldwide including Google, Microsoft, Nomura Research, mobile network operators and so many others that I’ll blog just on that. Connect is now a part of product roadmaps across industry sectors, built into global commercial products and implemented in open-source libraries for deployment.
While we are in the final stretch of launching OpenID Connect, now the hard work begins. It’s time to roll-up the sleeves and focus on continued promotion, global adoption and proving the power of the standard. The week following launch in London at the GSMA Headquarters, OpenID Foundation Members such as Google, Microsoft, Ping Identity and others will meet with counterparts at the GSMA to begin work on ensuring interoperability across 850+ global Mobile Network Operators. The OpenID Foundation, the Open Identity Exchange, and the GSMA are collaborating on pilot and discovery projects and in 2014 will begin testing how OpenID Connect implementations can enhance online choice, efficiency, security and privacy.
These 2014 efforts beginning with GSMA complements the work that companies like Verizon, Daon and others have in flight in US NSTIC pilots, in the UK with the IDAP program and benefiting from the leading edge deployments in Japan. Thanks to all of you who labored long to make this important milestone. I look forward to our work together in 2014.
Don