Such issues include the "practical scope of online identity management" and the "variety of needs across large organizations".

The spokesperson also said the lifecycle costs and benefits of identity management systems "when transactions between individual clients and government service providers are infrequent" are also a problem.

To that end, Warrilow believes "you can safely assume 'federated' will be the buzzword in identity in 2006".

Hewlett-Packard's CTO for identity management and security, Jason Rouault, said there are standards relating to authentication, but types of authentication typically don't have standards from a vendor support point of view.

"Each vendor has its own APIs and that's a big issue, because enterprises that roll out identity management need to support many vendors," Rouault, who is working on standards-based identity management with the Liberty Alliance, said.