Despite a screaming need for integration, enterprise identity-and-access management continues to be a Tower of Babel of competing platforms and standards.

In recent years, a big obstacle to cross-platform integration has been the war of attrition between the Liberty Alliance, a consortium working on policy and technology issues for identity management, and operating system giant Microsoft, which has backed a competing set of protocols for secure Web transactions.

But that war may be ending, as new leadership takes the helm at Liberty amid news that the group has finally sat down with Microsoft to talk about integrating various standards frameworks.

“We have finally put down the boxing gloves and are trying to figure out how to solve our customers’ problems,” said Roger Sullivan, the newly elected president of the Liberty Alliance and vice president of Oracle’s Identity Management group.

The Liberty Alliance -- which includes Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, and IBM -- backs the ID-WSF (ID-Web Services Framework), a set of protocols for Web services. Microsoft supports another set, WS-Star.

Both protocols are used for secure information exchanges over the Internet, and eventually, the standards will likely converge.

The Liberty Alliance said its management board -- headed by Sullivan and vice president Jason Rouault, CTO of Identity Management at HP -- will focus this year on driving the convergence of identity standards and initiatives, and on delivering tools to help with identity issues in a number of contexts, including federation, SOAs and Web services, social networking, open source, and Web 2.0 initiatives.

Convergence in the identity sector will help organizations in every market segment build and deploy interoperable and more secure and privacy-respecting identity solutions, the group said.

The Web Services Framework from Liberty complements the WS-Star protocols, but two sets of standards create problems for enterprises that may have already invested in infrastructure, and enterprises may delay identity projects because of confusion, Sullivan said.

“We have customers who have deployed WSF, and we need to help them reconcile the two standards stacks so when convergence happens, it will be logical,” Sullivan said.

So far, Microsoft has been “cordial” in discussions with the Liberty Alliance, Sullivan said. In the coming year, Liberty and Microsoft will work with vendors to ensure the transition is smooth and doesn’t jeopardize expensive software investments, Sullivan said.

Competing standards protocols in the past have hampered the identity and access management field, according to a report that the research analyst firm IDC released in December.

With the protocol standards debate settling, however, IDC expects the revenue for identity technologies to rise from $3 billion in 2005 to $5.1 billion in 2010.