10 August, 2006 - 2:54am

Gartner Research's new report "Identity 2.0 is Too Ill-Defined for Imminent Deployment" is correct in stating that the different technical approaches will hinder adoption until standards are adopted. However, we believe there are a number of recent factors leading to widespread usage soon, including: current activity underway in the identity community for interoperability between protocols (including discussions with the Liberty Alliance); Sxip's involvement with OpenID along with a host of other companies; the OpenID bounty program; Wikipedia's intention of adopting OpenID; and the efforts being made by us and others over the past year for a user-centric standard; all of which are indicators to the start of an Identity 2.0 tipping point.

Gartner's findings state:

"Identity 2.0 will be relevant to online companies — and particularly consumer-focused companies — but not before 2008. There are various Identity 2.0 initiatives — including Microsoft's CardSpace (formerly InfoCard), Sxip and Higgins. While all the initiatives leverage Internet and Web protocols, there are different approaches for storing identity attributes and in securing the interactions; these different approaches are not clearly interoperable and lack a unifying standards-based framework.

Success for Identity 2.0 approaches will also require service providers to modify their Web sites and services to request, accept and authenticate identity data from clients and identity providers. This presents a potential "chicken and egg" problem whereby consumers don’t perceive the need to create digital personas until services are available to use them."

We agree that the community is faced with the "first fax machine" problem in that there's not much incentive for adoption just yet. However, given the efforts of ourselves, Microsoft, Novell, IBM, VeriSign, and countless others (including several governments), in trying to address the problem of siloed data on the web, we have no doubt that a solution will come about much quicker than 2008.

Finally, we wholeheartedly disagree with Gartner's conclusion that "Seeking to plan for Identity 2.0 now will only obfuscate immediate benefits of federated identity management". Federation and Identity 2.0 solve two different sets of problems on the web -- one is closed, the other open. Federation is a good solution for enterprises online that have a trust relationship between pre-defined partners. However this closed circle of trust doesn't not scale to the long tail of the internet.

Sxip's Founder & CEO, Dick Hardt, describes these differences in greater detail in the Identity 2.0 sequel video "Who is the Dick on Your Site" from ETech earlier this year. Join the conversation and let us know what you think.