13 August, 2007 - 3:50pm

Gartner's 2007 Hype Cycle Report on Identity & Access Management Technologies published earlier this summer positions user-centric, Identity 2.0 technologies such as OpenID, CardSpace and Higgins as "technology triggers" that are "on the rise", though two to five years away from mainstream adoption. They recommend that consumer facing organizations monitor the evolution of these "Personal Identity Frameworks".

Some of the business benefits they ascribe to PIFs are "reduced data entry burden" on websites and "increased willingness to provide personal information" because of greater convenience. They list Sxip, IBM, Microsoft, Novell, and VeriSign as being the vendors in this space and suggest the business impact from PIFs includes:

• reduced sign-on
• common user experience
• credentials, attributes or claims similar to a driver's license or loyalty cards
• convergence and interoperablity with a standard dev framework for developers to use disparate identity protocols and repositories

We look forward to Gartner's IAM conference this fall and the Identity 2.0 talk by Gartner analyst Gregg Kreizman, where this will be discussed in greater detail.