If there's one topic that's guaranteed to get increasingly important over the next few years then it's how individuals expose and share their identities in both the virtual and physical worlds. As far back as 1991, the New Yorker magazine ran a remarkably prescient cartoon showing a dog sitting at a PC with the caption – ‘On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog'.
While the youth market seems to take a typically promiscuous approach to on-line identities, sharing material and information that's inevitably going to haunt them in later life, identity management in its broadest sense is going to be vitally important to the future shape of society as well as to the revenue streams of service providers. So far however, only a few seem aware of this, though some companies are already staking out the ground, ready for an expected surge of interest.
For Doug Daberius, head of identity solution management at Nokia Siemens Networks (who last year acquired subscriber data management specialist Apertio), what began as a simple extension to subscriber data consolidation is now morphing into a potentially critical core function for service providers. "At one end, subscriber identity management is about simplifying the user experience – through single sign-on features, for example. At the other, it's about the service provider becoming a trusted intermediary with all sorts of other Web 2.0 applications and services like permissive advertising. There's also a very strong case to be made that early adoption of an identity management strategy will save considerable operating and capital expense later on as awareness of the importance of identity issues grows amongst the wider population."
Many of these themes are echoed by Amardeo Sarma, a senior manager at NEC's European R&D labs where work on an Identity Brokerage system is underway. "Identity management isn't just about benefitting the privacy of the user – though that's obviously vitally important," he comments. "The world of services out there is getting more complex by the minute with new industries like finance and advertising adding functions and features and traditional boundaries breaking down. As an industry, we have to find appropriate ways to manage this both for the end-user's benefit as well as that of the wider industry."
One of the other important angles on identity is its intimate relationship with policy. Bridgewater Systems used MWC this year to launch its Subscriber Data Broker solution to link policy and subscriber identity information with an increasingly open service environment. David Sharpley, senior VP at the company commented, "Bridgewater's service creation approach to subscriber data management is a major advancement over legacy LDAP-based models that require costly development and integration for each new application. By federating dynamic subscriber data from existing data stores and using sophisticated tools to broker this data to third-party applications, it enables service providers to rapidly create and deliver personalized applications such as mobile advertising."