Oracle Submits IGF to Liberty Alliance

REDWOOD SHORES, Calif. -- Liberty Alliance, the global identity consortium working to build a more trusted Internet for consumers, governments and businesses worldwide, and Oracle today announced that Oracle has submitted the Identity Governance Framework (IGF) royalty-free to Liberty Alliance. The IGF is an open standards-based initiative developed by Oracle to help organizations better govern and protect sensitive identity-related employee, customer and partner information as it flows across heterogeneous applications. Liberty Alliance will leverage its expert groups, diverse global membership and leadership in addressing the technology, business and privacy aspects of digital identity management to further develop the IGF specifications.

“Oracle has taken the lead in developing an important framework to allow organizations of all sizes and in every market sector to better manage and protect a wide range of private identity information,” said Brett McDowell, Executive Director of the Liberty Alliance. “By developing the IGF standards in Liberty Alliance, Oracle is helping to ensure the broadest possible industry support for advancing the framework quickly.”

Oracle released a draft of the IGF in Nov. 2006 with industry support for the initiative from CA, HP, Layer 7, Novell, Ping Identity, Securent and Sun Microsystems. The IGF establishes a standard way of defining enterprise-level policies for organizations to share sensitive personal information securely and confidently between applications and diverse identity sources while helping ensure security and privacy. With the IGF, organizations can more easily determine and control how identity information ─ including personally identifiable information, access entitlements and personal attributes ─ is used, stored and propagated across diverse systems, helping ensure the information is easily auditable and not abused, compromised or misplaced.

“As part of its commitment to speed the development and adoption of the IGF to improve security across enterprise applications, Oracle is making the IGF specifications available royalty free,” said Prateek Mishra, Director, Identity Management Standards, Oracle. “Vendors working with Oracle and the Liberty Alliance to further develop the specification, as well as customers implementing solutions based on the specification will be able to use the IGF specifications with clarity about Oracle’s licensing intentions. This spans all of the key components of the IGF, including the CARML Specification, CARML Schema, CARML Client API and AAPML Specification.” Additional information can be found at: http://www.oracle.com/goto/igf/ip.

Oracle Corp. (Nasdaq: ORCL)