Liberty Alliance Launches Telecom Special Interest Group

PRESS RELEASE

New York and Madrid, Jan. 27, 2009 - Liberty Alliance, the global identity community working to build a more trustworthy Internet for businesses, governments and people, today announced the launch of the public Liberty Alliance Telecom Special Interest Group (SIG). The group has been formed by representatives from Ericsson, NEC, NeuStar, Orange, Symlabs and TeliaSonera and is the tenth Liberty Alliance special interest group open to both Liberty Alliance members and non-members. The goal of the SIG is to develop best practices for managing identity-information and identity-enabled transactions and services in the global telecom sectors.

Liberty SAML 2.0 Federation and Liberty Identity Web Services are widely validated and deployed in the telecom and service provider industries. Gartner states that "SAML 2.0 has become the de facto federation standard across industries."1 Burton Group recommends organizations consider Liberty Alliance ID-WSF 2.0 specifications when implementing federation.2 The SIG is working to advance identity-enabled enterprise and Web 2.0 applications in the telecom sector based on Liberty Alliance standards and the Liberty Identity Governance and Identity Assurance Frameworks. According to Jose Luis Mariz, strategic product manager at Ericsson and chair of the Liberty Alliance Telecom SIG, "The formation of the Telecom SIG provides organizations and individuals in the telecom industry with an important public forum for collaboratively fostering the next generation of interoperable, secure and privacy-respecting identity-enabled applications for businesses and people." About the Public Telecom SIG Members of the Liberty Alliance Telecom SIG are collaborating with other groups and standards bodies to identify and eliminate the technology and policy issues telecom operators face when it comes to the wide-scale deployment of interoperable identity-enabled applications and services. The new Telecom SIG joins a growing ecosystem of industry-specific SIGs formed by market leaders active in Liberty Alliance, such as Healthcare and eGovernment, who are working to ensure their specialized identity management and services requirements are being met by emerging technology and policy frameworks. Information about the Telecom SIG, including how to join public calls and mail lists, is available at http://tinyurl.com/9ffnke 1) Source: Gartner, Inc. "The U.S. Government's Adoption of SAML 2.0 Shows Wide Acceptance", by Gregg Kreizman, John Pescatore and Ray Wagner, October 29, 2007 2) Source: Burton Group "Federated Identity", by Bob Blakley, October 2008