Identity federation is an area suitable for cooperation, even between otherwise competitive stakeholders. The reason is that there are no “killer business cases”. Only a significant quantity of business cases sharing the IDM infrastructure can have success. Therefore cooperation should be promoted on national, EU and global levels. This will also avoid to create “vendor niches” that lock a market to a small base of products and services.
As cooperation in identity federation is beneficial on a business level, standardization is advantageous on the technical level. The resulting ecosystem will provide more products, tools, suppliers and service offerings that will drive economics of scale. In addition the export-oriented industry in Europe is better off with open standards, because this expands market opportunity.