Liberty Alliance holdout IBM ends resistance and joins

The alliance is working on standards for managing user identities

By Robert McMillan and Stacy Cowley

October 20, 2004 12:00 PM ET

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IDG News Service - IBM has become the latest company to join the Liberty Alliance, a global consortium aimed at developing standards for managing user identities. IBM joins Oracle Corp. and Intel Corp. as a backer of the effort, which Sun Microsystems Inc. leads.
The company joined the group today, IBM said in a statement sent to analysts.
The Liberty Alliance was established in 2001, but IBM was initially reluctant to back the consortium, choosing instead to pursue its own identity management standards.
As Liberty gained momentum, however, customer demand pushed IBM to work with Liberty's specifications. IBM signed a deal earlier this year with Orange SA, France Telecom SA's mobile division, to create a single-sign-on service for Orange's 50 million cellular phone customers that complies with the Liberty specifications. The initiative is one of the largest so far using the Liberty guidelines and is touted by the consortium as a vote of confidence in its work.
"We were just meeting [Orange's] needs," IBM spokesman Ron Favali said, referring to that project's Liberty compliance. "IBM joining Liberty now is the next logical step in that progression."
IBM plans to support "a broad range of federated identity specifications across its Tivoli identity management product line," including its own Web Services Federation specification, the company said in a statement. IBM drafted WS-Federation, a rival federated identity specification, in conjunction with authors from Microsoft Corp. and BEA Systems Inc.

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