Let’s say you run a medium-sized airline covering only the UK and Europe, but your passengers would also like to fly to the Far East or the USA. Your customers have to take your competitor’s airline overseas and you, in turn, lose their loyalty and their business.
Now Big Airline approaches you. They would like to expand into some of the regions you serve (such as Stansted and Birmingham) and, in return, they will provide you with some of their service areas. It is a win-win situation: you get new customers and the chance to build your brand but don’t need to incur the enormous expense of providing service to, say, JFK or Tokyo Narita. You simply rely on the capabilities and services of Big Airline.
This is a simplified, shorthand sketch of how powerful airline alliances came into being, and why they remain strong. The customer wins, the airlines win. Imagine the reverse situation, where each and every airline – independent of all the others – tried to win and then maintain routes to as many airports as possible. The expense would be completely unsupportable.Limitless possibilities Now let’s extend the argument. Consider, for example, a bank or a mobile telecommunications service provider. At first, the connection with an alliance of airlines might not seem too obvious. However, think about the numbers of databases each of those companies must maintain and the costs of those databases. Then reflect upon the potential opportunities that are lost because the priceless information within those databases remains in silos.
That’s bad enough when the data is isolated within the company (an all-toofamiliar syndrome) but the potential value of the lost synergies because customers can’t interact across different companies is truly staggering. In the past, such data sharing was less necessary. But in today’s customercentric, hyper-competitive world the inability to share impedes business growth and imposes the unacceptable costs of re-inventing the wheel time and time again.
However, if some kind of secure information sharing alliance could be developed so that the mobile telecommunications service provider and the bank could share services not only with each other, but also with automobile dealerships, insurance companies, consumer goods retail outlets, and so on, the possibilities become limitless. For example, while looking at their mobile phone bill online, a person could, in complete privacy and in one seamless process, check their bank account balance and then look at the latest cars and perhaps begin the purchase process. The mobile telecommunications service provider,although providing the entry point for the string of interactions, would not have access to the sensitive data being displayed.
This, again, is a win-win situation: the customer is securely and conveniently provided with new services; the bank/car dealership/mobile telecommunications service provider offers services that the person wants; the customer’s demands are met and their loyalty improves.
This kind of scenario has been associated with a variety of technologies, including Single Sign-on,Web Services and PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) to name but three. What has largely been missing has been a clearly defined and secure way for firms to conduct business between companies. This, in a nutshell, is what Federated Identity offers today: a well defined, open and vendor agnostic blueprint for companies to share ‘identity information’ without compromising security.
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