The deal represents is the largest adoption of an identity and account management system based on the Liberty Alliance specification, the firm said. While Big Blue is not a member of the Liberty Alliance, the deal shows that the organisation's identity specification is gaining ground among e-commerce providers as France Telecom required that Big Blue comply with the group's latest specification.
"Our customers have been asking for Liberty federated identity," said Venkat Raghavan, manager of security products for IBM's Tivoli Software group. "They wanted a common way for users to access the services."
The system will allow users of France Telecom's Orange cellular network to sign on the system using either a mobile phone or a personal computer. With a single ID, the user can then access services offered by France Telecom and its partners. The service also allows users to automatically retrieve passwords in a secure manner.
"We continuously look for more efficient ways to secure systems and administer users effectively, and identity federation is the next frontier," said Jean-Paul Maury, vice president for France Telecom. Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.
E-commerce providers and large corporations have focused on identity management -- the former for customer, the latter for employees -- as a means to cut costs and make services easier to manage. Identity management centralises the data about individuals to make administering access rights and personal information easier. The Liberty Alliance was formed to create standards on how to allow one company's services to use another firm's identity management system.
Microsoft, which has standardised on the Web Services framework for identity management, has not committed to supporting the Liberty Alliance specification in its products. IBM worked with Microsoft to develop the Web Services framework. The company retreated somewhat from pushing identity services after it failed to attract a significant number of companies to its Passport Web identity infrastructure.
The Liberty Alliance counted the deal as a big step forward for its framework.
"Obviously, one of the key things here is that customers are demanding that providers not only support Liberty but go through the compliance tests," said Simon Nicholson, chair of the business and marketing expert group for the Liberty Alliance.
Nicholson, who is the manager of strategic industry initiatives for Sun Microsystems, said the phones will increasingly be the data access point that people use to get services, making single sign-on systems even more important, since logging into a network with a phone is much slower than using a PC's keyboard.
Applications that France Telecom hopes that it or its partners will supply include instant messaging, location-based services, games, online banking and email.
