Liberty Alliance Names New President, Plans Outreach Campaign

Catalyzed by Sun Microsystems five years ago, the Liberty Alliance is a consortium of IT vendors working together on standardizing identity authentication protocols throughout the industry.

Its more than 100 worldwide members include IBM, CA Oracle, Novell, Hewlett-Packard and RSA, as well as consumer-focused service providers such as PayPal and America Online. Microsoft remains a high-profile holdout.

Expanding the Liberty Alliance's reach will be a top priority this year, Sullivan said in an interview after his appointment was announced.

"We need to be much more transparent about the work that we have done so that other groups or other initiatives in the industry can leverage the work," Sullivan said.

"In any industry, there will be different points of view. What we need to do, as an organization, is reach across the aisle and say, 'We can help you. Where there is synergy between our initiatives, we want to help drive that synergy.'"

"Different points of view" is diplomatic understatement. Identity standards have been a politicized battleground, with Microsoft and IBM backing a set of standards collectively known as WS-* (or WS-Star) and the Liberty Alliance members backing a competing specification, SAML 2.0.

After years of tug-of-warring between the two sides for supremacy, the industry has moved toward a detente acknowledging that both standards are staying put. WS-Star underpins CardSpace (formerly InfoSpace), the identity authentication technology Microsoft has baked into its .Net Framework 3.0.

"WS-Star is a given in the industry," Sullivan acknowledged. "Our customers, the members of the Alliance, are saying, 'Hey, there is this standards set, WS-Star, and we need to figure out how to make our work interoperate with that work.' Because unless we do, the marketplace is potentially frozen."

Has Microsoft shown any signs of thawing? Sullivan picked his words carefully: "When I have met with senior Microsoft folks in informal sessions -- when I pick up the phone to call, when we're on panels -- those conversations have been extremely cordial and non-confrontational. I would characterize the conversations as a willingness to work on the same problems we both want to see solved."

Leaving aside the issue of the Redmond Goliath, the alliance is also working to cultivate connections with other identity-focused projects and organizations. Late last year, it adopted a new policy of opening its plenary sessions to non-members.

A meeting held in July in conjunction with the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW) was "like a breath of fresh air," Sullivan said.

Swapping ideas between the enterprise-focused Liberty Alliance and end-user-focused IIW was a huge success, he said; an upcoming Liberty meeting will include a representative from the Higgins Trust Framework Project, an Eclipse initiative developing an end-user identity management system.

The Liberty Alliance deals in the gritty details of arcane technical issues; its successes tend to happen behind the scenes. But its work is evident in the industry's infrastructure: more than a billion devices and applications now support Liberty's federation and Web services specifications.

Financial services providers running applications like 401(k) customer portals, manufacturers connecting with their supply chain, and European smart-phone makers have been among the leading-edge adopters, Sullivan said.

"People in the industry really expect that '07 will be the knee of the hockey stick. The trend upward will dramatically increase," Sullivan said. "The adoption that was predicted has certainly come about. It may have taken a bit longer than we expected, but nevertheless, it has come about."