OASIS today announced the member approval of the Identity Metasystem Interoperability (IMI) standard v1 that enables the use of Information Cards. This is great news. Now that a standard is out, the initial fear of vendor lock-in or proprietary formats is diminished.
CA has strongly endorsed this initiative as evidenced by our release of Information Card support within our CA SiteMinder product last year. With this new standard in hand, the adoption of relying parties and identity providers can proceed with assurance that the evolution of the technology is being executed in an open and standardized fashion.
Information Cards grew out of the Identity Metasystem championed by Microsoft, and others such as CA, IBM, Oracle, and Novell, as well as the open source initiative Higgins. Organizations like OSIS were formed to provide an environment by which this new fledgling technology could be tested and various implementations validated for interoperability. The acceptance of this new paradigm has culminated in the IMI standard.
The IMI specification will make it much easier for additional enhancements to be brought to market and for the benefits of the Identity Metasystem to be realized. CA is excited by the possibilities a claims-based model (a topic for another blog) brings to the Identity and Access Management arena. CA plans on continuing its developments in this area, and on helping our customers take advantage of the business opportunities that this new paradigm can offer. What are your views on Information Cards and claims-based models? Do you have plans to implement these technologies?