The Liberty Alliance Project today announced that Intel Corporation has joined the global consortium developing an open federated identity standard and business tools for implementing identity-based services, as both a sponsor member and participating company on the Alliance’s Management Board. As a Liberty Alliance member, Intel will continue its efforts towards the evolution of additional devices that can take advantage of Liberty Alliance compliant infrastructure and services.

Liberty’s federated approach to identity management provides a standards-based foundation for identity networks and services. By identity-enabling systems and services, companies can increase security, create new efficiencies to cut internal IT costs, enable new business opportunities and make Web services more privacy friendly.

Identities play a large role in the convergence between computing and communications, which is an evolution Intel has been driving for many years. Intel has worked hard to advance basic building blocks both at the silicon level as well as at the platform hardware/software level. Joining Liberty Alliance will help Intel continue to advance the development of identity standards that will become one of the basic building blocks for emerging computing and communications usage models.

“Authentication and identity management are critical to the success of new computer and communications usages,” said Colin Evans, Director System Software, Corporate Technology Group, Intel. “Liberty Alliance brings together an exciting array of companies from many industries to define these standards and we are looking forward to working with our customers and member companies to make implementation a reality across all the hardware platforms we provide.”

In addition, as the newest member on the Management Board, Intel is one of 15 companies responsible for overall governance and operations of the Liberty Alliance. This new membership status will allow Intel the opportunity to work with the Liberty Alliance membership to assist in the creation and recommendation of future specifications and business tools in the area of federated identity.