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Liberty Alliance Certifies SAML Interoperability

The Liberty Alliance Project, a global consortium for open federated identity standards and identity-based Web services, announced that products from eight companies passed testing at Liberty’s most recent interoperability conformance event. These companies demonstrated interoperability of products and solutions that incorporate Liberty’s Identity Web Services (1.1) and SAML 2.0 OASIS Standard specifications.

Liberty Alliance awarded passing marks to Electronics & Telecommunications Research Institute, Ericsson, Novell, Oracle, Reactivity, Sun Microsystems, Symlabs and Trustgenix.

“It’s all about the reality of products that work together in actual deployments,” says Earl Perkins, vice president, Gartner. “Formal testing programs that prove products from different vendors can work together with a new standard are important. Vendors that pass the tests are showing due diligence in meeting industry requirements for interoperability, and products that use OASIS interoperability standard SAML 2.0 are fulfilling one of those key requirements.”

Liberty tested SAML 2.0 products to ensure they exercise the Liberty protocols that will be used in real-world deployments, the group says. Organizations can trust that products passing Liberty interoperability testing will interoperate from day one and long term. This reduces costs, shortens deployment cycles and makes implementing open identity solutions easier, Liberty says.

“Liberty’s latest testing program marks a significant advancement for organizations looking to deploy open identity solutions based on SAML 2.0 specifications,” says Roger Sullivan, chair of the Liberty Alliance conformance program and VP of business development for Oracle’s Identity Management solutions. “As organizations increasingly migrate to SAML 2.0 technologies, they can count on products that have passed Liberty’s interoperability testing for faster and more successful deployments.”

The Liberty Interoperable testing program requires each company to complete successfully tests against scripts and scenarios prepared by Liberty Alliance and published on Liberty’s Web site. As part of the testing, companies must demonstrate interoperability with at least two other randomly selected participants. The program requires repeated operation of the Liberty specifications core features in many combinations and sequences and in different roles and contexts common to real-world deployments.