Identity Federation is mainstream technology

Looks like standards based identity federation is really getting into the mainstream now. Yesterday saw a full page advertisement from Oracle on the back cover of the 20 january 2007 issue of the Economist. In this ad Oracle listed 12 standards and specifications and compared support for these in its own middleware product with that of a competitor. The interesting part is that the list contained WS-Federation, SAML, and Liberty Alliance specifications.
On a similar note recently heard from a service provider that their customers had been starting to ask for federated access to the services. First time that I hear about such requests, as far as I know usually it has been the large service providers that have convinced their cusomters to federate into their services.