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Twelve Companies Earn Liberty Alliance Interoperable Logo

The Liberty Alliance, the global consortium developing an open federated identity standard and business tools for implementing identity-based services, announced products and services from 12 companies have earned the Liberty Alliance Interoperable mark in the latest Liberty-sponsored conformance test -- the first event to test against the Liberty Identity Web Services specification ID-WSF 1.0. The Liberty Alliance continues to be the only organization to offer more than simple specification interoperability testing and officially validate Liberty Federation and Identity Web Services implementations in products and services.

Alcatel, Elios, IBM, NEC, Nokia, Novell, NTT, Oracle, Ping Identity, Sun Microsystems, Symlabs and Trustgenix have been awarded the "Liberty Alliance Interoperable" mark. Following a rigorous testing process, conformant products may display the Liberty Alliance's highest stamp of quality, which offers buying assurances to end customers that products are truly interoperable out- of-the-box, shortening deployment cycles, increasing productivity and saving costs.

"Participants are responding to market demand for validation of quality and assurance of true interoperability," said Roger Sullivan, vice-chair of the Liberty Alliance Conformance Expert Group. "The conformance program offers vendors and service providers the opportunity to respond to the customer mandate for products and services that have earned the 'Liberty Alliance Interoperable' mark."

The Liberty conformance program requires that each company successfully complete tests against scripts and scenarios prepared by the Liberty Alliance Conformance Expert Group and published on the Liberty Alliance Web site. As part of the testing, companies must demonstrate interoperability with at least two other randomly selected participants. The program requires repeated operation of the Liberty specification's core features in many combinations and sequences and in different roles and contexts common to real-world deployments. The federation testing reviewed federation establishment and termination, single sign-on, opaque name registration, affiliation, identity proxying and anonymous login. The identity Web services testing reviewed authentication, service registration and update, service lookup, service invocation and interaction.

"Liberty is pleased with the rapid adoption of its Identity Web Services specifications, and the response of both members and non-members who want to assure the market that their products will interoperate with these specifications out of the box," said Donal O'Shea, executive director of Liberty Alliance. "Companies who have earned the 'Liberty Alliance Interoperable' mark report that customers more easily create partnerships, in part because displaying the mark delivers instant market credibility and assures rapid deployment."