I have always found it tricky to reflect on whether a new technology has met its expectations, unless the technology has been a complete flop or is obviously ubiquitous.

From my perspective, federation is not a flop and it’s not yet ubiquitous, but it is successful. Federation has helped many organizations enhance their businesses, and it successfully has laid important groundwork on which technologies such as SOA and Web services are being built.

While there is no technology magic that can completely overcome the real business issues of liability and trust inherent with federation, I know that there are thousands of organizations around the world using federation today to enable parts of their organizations, using technology from CA and other vendors.

When we look back in 10 years I would predict that in one form or another, a standards-based technology that enables the secure sharing of identity information across the Internet to enable access to applications, data, and other services (aka federation) will in fact be quite commonly used. With federation both being used today and baked into the future via such emerging technologies as Web services, I see the future for federation still being very bright.

Federation is a powerful tool and our experiences have become increasingly positive in the engineering and implementation of SAML 1.1 and 2.0.

In my opinion what is needed to improve adoption is more standards in support of federation meshes or clouds (services to find the home portal for the user and standards by which levels of identity assurance are included).

I believe Liberty will continue to recognize and address this space. At this point the technology is only half there. This will help provide a measurement on which contracts will be more easily solidified.

While you raise some valid points about the slow adoption of Federated Identity Management, it is in fact the very issues you define – time, manpower and money – that are driving the world’s largest aerospace and defense companies to get onboard with this most effective approach to ensuring secure information sharing – across the enterprise and across the world.

Next week, I’ll be on a panel at Digital IDWorld, with Keith Ward of the TransGlobal Secure Collaboration Progam and Northrop Grumman and Jeff Nigriny of CertiPath to talk about how the large A&D companies such as Lockheed Martin, Rolls Royce and Raytheon are in the midst of deploying large scale Identity Federation solutions for their supply chain and in effect are demonstrating just exactly how effective Federated ID can be and why it is well-worth the effort. We’d welcome the chance to directly address any and all skeptics.