In a recent interview, Bob Blakley of the Burton Group, recently was asked about "the most serious problem" interoperable identity is facing. He responded:

The most serious question we're facing - and really it trumps all the others - is "how do identity providers make money"?

Now here is a true statement about this budding industry if I ever heard one. As far as I can tell, today none of the public OpenID Providers has anything resembling a business model for what they do, not even the inklings of one. With the exception of the very big guys (e.g. AOL) where also asserting identities to third parties is a small incremental cost to their offering, while potentially reaping lots of indirect benefits, such as visibility into the browsing behavior of their customers.

[This explains why we stopped investing into our public identity provider some time ago. I simply can't see how a startup can make any money off it. It will stay around and keeps signing up customers, and it's an interesting project to learn from. But money?]

This does not mean there aren't a number of identity-provider-related business opportunities around that actually do have a model. And yes, some of you reading this have asked us about this ;-) and we are glad to help out, either directly or with partner(s).