An historical event occurred this past week at Catalyst. There was an interop event where different identity management systems shared different identity tokens including Micosoft's InfoCard, SAML, OpenID, Higgins and others.
The event was historical because it clearly demonstrated the inter-operability of the different identity systems. All of the many vendors had worked hard together to show that their systems could and would use other vendors identity systems to authenticate.
Pam Dingle from Nulli Secundus, and head of the Pamela Project, gave an excellent presentation at Burton. With enthusiasm she showed the attendees the opportunity, the pain and the potential of moving towards an inter-operable identity system.
An excellent afternoon of presentations proceeded the interop. Speaker like Dick Hardt of Sxip, Praveen Alavilli of AOL, Gerry Gebel of Burton and a good panel discussion of Bob Blakely of Burton, Dale Olds of Novell, Dave Miller of Covisintand George Flether of AOL and Kim Cameroon of Microsoft all painted a realistic vision of the future involving inter-operable identity systems, user-centric identity and the challenges ahead.
Congratulations to all the many folks who have spend a long time working hard to make this happen!
Guy
www.authenticationworld.com
guy.huntington@authenticationworld.com
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