It’s beautiful and quiet at Vail Cascade this morning. As I stepped outside, I’m pretty sure I saw SAML scurrying away into the trees. This is weird given this week’s proclamations that SAML was dead. Although we won’t be rid of SAML anytime soon, I do look forward to enterprise adoption of the new kid on the block: OpenID Connect. Easier federation, OpenID Connect-style is already common for consumer identity providers; enterprise identity providers should take note and follow suit. As a vendor of API Management infrastructure, it’s up to us to enable the enterprise to better reach out to its target audience. I see support for OpenID Connect as a key component in achieving this today.

My favorite proclamation of the week goes to Patrick Harding who declared in his talk titled “The Platformication of the Enterprise is Upon us Again and They Forgot Security (Again)” that API tokens are going to be “the currency of the API economy”. The management of tokens and their lifecycle is indeed a crucial component of API Management. Consider the case of a mobile application consuming an enterprise API using an OAuth token. Such tokens are associated with the API provider, the user (subscriber), the mobile application and the mobile device. Each live token is potentially associated with multiple parties and one of the challenges of API token management is to enable control of the right tokens by the right parties.