Novell Seeks E-Com Identity
By Todd Spangler, Inter@ctive Week
September 13, 1999 4:55 PM ET
What does Novell know about "identity brokering" that others haven't yet figured out?
Novell's hoping the answer will become clearer next month when it officially takes the wraps off Digital Me, directory-based Internet software that promises to protect consumers' personal information online while easing the process of sharing that data with electronic commerce sites.
Like other so-called "infomediaries" that have developed digital wallets and personal profiling software, Novell aims to empower users by putting them in control of their own information. But unlike other identity brokers, Novell sees itself uniquely positioned as a technology provider to the emerging segment.
The strategy calls for the company to stay out of the customer-merchant relationship, and instead provide its technology to existing "trust providers" - the financial institutions, credit-card issuers and other entities with which consumers already have a relationship. Novell will reportedly announce that among the first trust providers licensing Digital Me are two high-profile financial institutions: Citigroup and First USA.
"We're providing value that enhances existing business relationships," said Michael Simpson, director of strategic market planning at Novell. "Other companies might see this as an opportunity to eliminate other trust providers on the Internet, but I think that's a failed business model."
Privacy-conscious consumers are certainly interested in finding ways to protect their personal information. More than two-thirds of all Internet users said they are either "very or extremely concerned" about privacy on the Internet, according to a study by Forrester Research.
And many vendors are salivating at the perceived opportunity in identity brokering - including Microsoft, whose soon-to-launch Passport service includes a secure wallet for storing payment information and a feature to automatically log users into the sites of Passport partners. Other companies looking at the space include start-ups such as @YourCommand, Enonymous.com, Lumeria and PrivaSeek.
So far, though, no single technology has won widespread support from consumers or online merchants and financial institutions. For its part, Microsoft has announced just eight third-party sites - including Food.com, iGo.com and SkyMall.com -that plan to participate in Microsoft Passport.
It's no wonder, then, that analysts said the success of Novell's Digital Me, like other infomediary models, depends not on the strength of the technologies, but on how widely they are adopted. "To be useful, something like Digital Me needs to have [the] participation of hundreds of e-commerce vendors," said James McQuivey, a senior analyst at Forrester. "Scaling up to that level will be very difficult."
Digital Me - based on Novell's high-capacity directory software, Novell Directory Services Version 8 - is designed to be the infrastructure that identity brokers use to handle transactions and to provide the secure repository for an individual's information. Consumers enter personal information into the Digital Me application on their local PC; when visiting a Digital Me-enabled site, only the data that they've chosen to make public will be transmitted.
Novell said it intends to work toward an industry standard for exchanging e-commerce information. The company said it is backing the Electronic Commerce Modeling Language, which is a format designed to promote digital wallets.
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