The nice folks at Kuppinger & Cole, organizers of the highly successful European Identity Conference, have graciously invited me to put together the track on user-centric identity at their second conference next week.

With now hundreds of millions of OpenIDs available in the market from major providers, CardSpace shipping with all copies of Windows Vista, and the first slate of non-Windows identity selectors appearing from name-brand vendors, user-centric identity is now clearly the red-hot topic for identity and security in 2008 and 2009.

I’m even more fortunate to have a first-rate cast of speakers join me for this track:

• George Fletcher, Chief Architect at AOL, will speak about AOL’s OpenID implementation that has provided OpenID identities to all of AOL’s users since last year.
• Helmer Wieringa, Technology Officer at Reed Business (the largest division in Reed-Elsevier, a major media and conference company), will make the case why publishers such as Reed only have to gain from migrating old username/password schemes to universal usernames and no passwords.
• Kim Cameron, Chief Architect for Identity at Microsoft (responsible for Windows CardSpace), Ariel Gordon, Director of Identity Management at France Telecom / Orange (responsible for Orange’s offering of OpenIDs to all of their broadband subscribers), Dale Olds, Novell Distinguished Engineer (developing the Digital Me identity selector on Linux and the Mac through the Higgins and Bandit open-source projects), Thomas Huhn (OpenID entrepreneur in Germany) and Snorri Giorgetti (OpenID Foundation’s representative in Europe) will join George, Helmer and me on an interactive panel to discuss the business case for user-centric identity and the unfolding competitive dynamics of adopters and their competitors.

I will start the track with an introduction into the technologies, projects and business cases for user-centric identity to give attendees a solid footing in what user-centric identity is all about, who is who, and why it matters to individuals and businesses alike.

My goal with the track is not only to educate identity and security professionals on the rapidly changing identity landscape by providing a representative set of views from leaders in the movement, but also to give you the ammunition with which you can make the case in your companies that user-centricity is here to stay, and that companies that get ahead of the curve have a number of unique business opportunities in front of them.

You can find more information about the conference here: www.id-conf.com/eic2008. Hope to see you there! If it is like last year’s, it will very likely be worth your while.