This is the second day of the First European Identity Conference in München, which is taking place at the Forum Deutsches Museum — the granddaddy of all science and technology museums world-wide and still one of the best after more than 100 years.

Kuppinger Cole + Partner, the München-based analyst firm, has been doing a great job at both organizing the conference, and making it interesting. For my part, I have been at too many conferences where the moderators only asked softball questions, and I always consider it a waste of my time to listen to the resulting extremely predictable answers: But here, Tim Cole is asking very good questions, and so it’s really worth-while.

I’ll be sitting on a panel later today on open-source and identity, and I’m looking forward to being at the receiving end of the probing questions. (I should also say that Tim has been quoting me — both from this blog, and from personal correspondence — extensively throughout this conference, often to pose some kind of edgy question for some other speaker. I am feeling a bit bad about this, because that makes the job harder for my fellow presenters; but then, I personally like edgy questions because they are more illuminating and thus more worthwhile, even if they are sometimes hard to answer. But before anybody who has been at the receiving end this week beat me up: I did not know he was going to quote anything I’ve ever said at all, so I decline all direct responsibility!)

It’s also interesting to see that the market for this kind of technology is very different in Germany and Europe from the US market. As usual, in the US it is far more transparent who the players are, and what their relationships are, because there is a substantial industry making that information visible and forcing companies to react to competition. In Germany, it’s much more a relationship-based approach to business, rather than a market-based one, and so there are so many successful companies here that I have never heard of — and my American friends don’t seem to know them either; often not even the German ones.

But then, as I always say about the digital identity market in the stage that it is in: this is the stage where we need to let a 1000 flowers bloom, and the more the merrier; and in particular the more taking advantage of local or industry-specific knowledge, the better for all of us. Because then, when the true leaders emerge and consolidation happens, it’s clear that it wasn’t just one sector’s, or continent’s, or technology’s, or vertical’s requirements that were taken into account, but all/most of them. Which is the only way how the Identity Big Bang can happen from a commercial perspective.