"A new wave of hosted business applications provides a strong case for federation, which also has the ability to share attribute information."

Rouault said the evolution to standards-based ID management will be similar to how bank credit cards evolved, allowing people to use one card at different bank's ATMs.

Novell's CTO for identity-driven products, Carlos Montero-Luque agrees the industry "hasn't got there yet", but is moving in that direction.

"It used to be a very locked-down environment with strict requirements - that is changing substantially," Montero-Luque said.

"The standardization is critical and becomes a vendor problem. If the vendor cannot give you a good story for interoperability then the vendor is asking you to work around them."