Intel, Oracle, PayPal Back ID Technology Interop Group
Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service

The Kantara Initiative, formed to promote interoperability among identity verification applications and services, launched on Wednesday with big-name backers like Oracle, Intel, eBay's PayPal, AOL, CA, Novell, Fidelity Investments, Liberty Alliance, Boeing, Internet Society and British Telecom.

Kantara (kan-TAR-a): Swahili for "bridge"; Arabic roots in "harmony"

Kantara Initiative: Bridging and harmonizing theidentity community with actions that will help ensure secure,identity-based, online interactions while preventing misuse of personalinformation so that networks will become privacy protecting and morenatively trustworthy environments.

Enterprise vendors, large companies and technology startups have in recent years developed a wide array of identity applications and services, creating a growing need to address this technology fragmentation, said Roger Sullivan, an Oracle executive who is president of the Liberty Alliance and of the Kantara Initiative.

"This initiative is aimed at harmonizing across the wide spectrum of ID technologies and ID business practices, from social networking Web 2.0 communities to traditional enterprise deployments and technologies," said Sullivan, Oracle's vice president of identity management.

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