Interview with Fulup Ar Foll, Oracle

Phillip up our fall thought leader and member of Canara initiative is interoperability in identity systems, an issue. And should we be concerned about it?

Yeah, it it's, it's more than an issue. It's it's the beginning of the solution. So as today, unfortunately it has not been correctly addressed by the market. And the reason is extremely simple is that people have been focusing on the technical building block. So open standard is mostly responding to technical issues and no one has done the job to assemble all to framework correctly in order to guarantee capability. The main reason for, for this not be achieved yet is because it imposed to takes a hard decision in meeting.

And it's easier in to arrive to conclusion where you leave lot of options open and leave to the implement. So difficulties of having the system to interpret, Of course, all the big companies at least do lip service to things like open ID, they're all members of the open ID Federation. Are they actually serious about it? You know, open ID is a good example of being just a product course. The fact you use open ID does not mean you can. I operate like the fact you use, some's not enough in order to operate. You have to go much further than that.

If we are willing to arrive in the identity space, to see what we know today on the phone network, where you can, you know, land in any country, switch your phone type in your pin code and be in a position few seconds later to receive and sun code, we have to restrict a lot and, and to consolidate the profile. So certification process in such a way that we really arrive to a system where identities are plug and face service, Of course, interoperability, like this is a kind of a hairball.

And it seems that the big guys like Google or face Facebook possibly are Microsoft seem very content to hand that hairball to small companies like Jan rain and say, you fix you, figure it out. Yeah.

You know, that's pretty obvious, you know, this big company, it is in their interest to, to build to close ecosystem where they can control and own as much as possible identity information from a given user. The fact they subcontract to some broker, you know, the interability or interconnection. It's just a way for them to pretend they're doing something without really doing it. The real answer obviously is if we arrive to an identity system that is equivalent to what we have on GSM or T C P I P, then the power of the big company are going to decrease.

So it's subject that they're not especially interested in this to happen. What do we have to do moving forward to actually ensure interoperability in the interest of the users? So the first thing is to, to, to build a system where we really listen to what the user wants. So it's as today, most of the committee standardization groups are controlled by the vendor or by the service provider. So it's important to make sure that we reverse that and that the user requirement is really what is driving all this framework, organization, profile definition, test the requirement.

We also have to make that open enough. So whoever is willing to check is conformance can do it, which mean not only the vendor, but also the people that are ready to use the technology proposed by vendor, which is impossible today.