Thursday, May 25, 2006

He said she said

In a comment to my previous post, Conor Cahill clarifies his meaning
That wasn't an exact quote, but pretty close. The point I was trying to make was in response to a question along the lines of "why don't we see liberty everywhere since it's been around like forever (4 years)".

My answer was along the lines of "while you don't see Liberty implemented all over the place in an ecommerce type environment you do see it in a large number of enterprise environments, especially enterprise reaching out to relying parties" (again, not a direct quote as I can't remember exactly what I said minutes ago, much less hours ago).

I also went on to explan that in my opinion the reason that you don't see it (or any other SSO solution including MS's Passport or AOL's SNS) everwhere is that SPs didn't see a significant benefit from it and were afraid to let someone else (the IdP) potentially get in the middle of their relationship with the customer.

This is changing now because of the need for strong authentication and anti-phishing/IDentity Theft. SPs are much more interested in this stuff nowadays then they were 3 or 4 years ago.
Unable to resist an opportunity to dig at Conor, our Liberty colleague from Ericsson, Carolina Canales-Valenzuela added
I usually tend to not participate in blogs, but here I cannot refrain - specially in a discussion where my good friend Paul is telling my good friend Conor that he is wrong :-).

Conor's phrase "again, not a direct quote as I can't remember exactly what I said minutes ago, much less hours ago" clearly confirms my theory that sometimes he doesn't listen to himself :-).

About the issue under discussion, I have some friends who claim that 4 years is a very short period for adoption and deployment of any new technology. This clearly applies, for instance, to the telco world, see UMTS or IMS deployment.
I believe that some of these identity management solutions have gone too far too quickly, it is like planting a seed in the desert. However, the time is coming.....

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