Intel, Oracle Join Liberty Alliance

In its bid to sign up more influential members for single sign-on services,
Liberty Alliance Monday said it has accepted the bids of Intel
and Oracle as sponsor members.

The move is somewhat of a coup for the identity management organization,
which is looking to provide an alternative software service to Microsoft’s
Passport product.

Like Passport, software created under Liberty allows users to sign on
securely from almost any computing device. Java steward Sun Microsystems
is an early prominent member.

Safeguarding such Web services is paramount at a time
when security concerns hold back the adoption of software-as-service models.
But with Microsoft ally Intel and rival Oracle
choosing Liberty over Passport, the consortium got a little stronger.

As sponsors, Intel and Oracle will be entitled to use federated identity
technical specifications as well as business and policy guidelines. Liberty
brought other new sponsor members to the fold, including the Business
Industry Political Action Committee, Gamefederation, Kayak
Interactive, Mobile Telephone Networks and Sharp Laboratories of
America.

In related news, Computer Associates, Giesecke & Devrient
and Trustgenix have upgraded their membership to become sponsors, and
11 organizations have recently joined the alliance as new associate and
affiliate members, bringing the total number of those active to 157. These
include Al-Elm Information Security, BMC Software,
Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, Interoperability Clearinghouse,
Terraplay Systems AB, T-Online
International AG, and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Liberty members AOL, Fidelity Investments, Hewlett-Packard,
Nokia, Novell, NTT,
Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Trustgenix and Vodafone plan to
demonstrate the interoperability of the consortium’s specs Wednesday at the
Burton Group Catalyst Conference in San Diego, Calif.

Liberty Alliance ID-FF 1.1, 1.2 and ID-WSF 1.0 specifications will be
employed in a demo that illustrates opt-in account linking, simplified sign-on,
attribute sharing and discovery service in numerous business scenarios. Last
month, Liberty
certified
products from nine vendors.