Identity Management New Look
Identity Management New Look
January 15, 2007: The Liberty Alliance has recruited a fresh new look for its management board and set its sights on expanding industry relationships in the year ahead.
The Liberty Alliance is a worldwide consortium of vendors working to provide a more ‘trusted’ internet for users while also pushing the move for standards around federated identity management. Federated identity is a process encouraging organisations to collaborate to allow users to sign into multiple applications on a single username and password.
Liberty’s board members for the 2007 calandar year will include representatives from a variety of vendors pushing identity management. Roger Sullivan, vice president of Oracle Identity Management, was voted to serve as the Liberty president for the year, after serving the previous two years as Liberty’s vice president.
Other Board member included representatives from HP, Sun Microsystems, AOL, Novell, Intel and Ericsson. Liberty says its Board members are responsible for guiding the direction of the organisation as well as the industry requirements for open and interoperable identity solutions.
The Alliance revealed its focus for 2007 will be to expand on relationships within the industry to build on its ability to allow end-users to leverage their work around identity management and use it to assist in making decisions over the deployment of solutions.
While Liberty has been unable to work with Microsoft as yet, their expanded focus could change the relationship in 2007. In interviews following Sullivan’s appointment, the incoming president indicated he had spoken informally with Microsoft a number of times and believes that Microsoft has expressed a willingness to solve the some problems that Liberty has identified.
Competing technologies between Microsoft and the Alliance has previously provided significant hurdles on the road towards federated identity.
While just ‘informal’ at this stage, talks with Microsoft could well provide the starting point for interoperable identity solutions.