The CAD/CAE systems I used with in the late 80’s were all special-purpose machines, i.e. hardware configuration, operating system, and application had been optimized for the specific purpose of doing CAD. While, obviously, general-purpose computers were underneath, that’s not how we thought about them: we thought about them as an integrated solution for a specific problem, called computer-aided design (or engineering), and that’s what they were for and optimized for; e.g. special keyboards, special mice, special screens and so forth.
Then, rather suddenly, the special-purpose CAD workstation gave way to a general-purpose engineering workstation that was sold as such. CAD packages became just one of many possible software applications one could run on it. The larger horizontal market (that of general-purpose workstations, with vertical-specific applications on it) had subsumed the specialized vertical market (vertical-specific integrated solutions that were integrated and optimized for that vertical from top to bottom).
Is the same thing going to happen in identity? There are many identity-related protocols in a variety of vertical industries. For example, in healthcare, there is HL7’s (that’s the premier health standards organization) CCOW (PDF) work that includes things such as defining the identity of patients. There are many other examples in other industries where either definitions of identity protocols / data models / … exist, or are under active consideration. How do they relate to the horizontally applicable technologies that like CardSpace, WS-*, OpenID, LID, Liberty, SAML etc.?
I tend to think of it this way:
Typically there is no danger in a vertical standard taking over, or even just being applicable across the entire market in a horizontal fashion — vertical standards tend to be far too specific for that, defining, say, “patient” very well, but not a general-purpose “person(a)”. On the reverse, one could sometimes think that there is also no danger of any horizontal standard being successfully applied to solve problems in a vertical industry — horizontal standards don’t tend to be specific enough to provide enough value in those verticals: precisely because horizontal standards don’t define “patient” and all the specific information that needs to be known about patients to be useful in healthcare. The same argument applies in different industries as well, of course.
However, as our world gets more connected, and as people use identity technologies in a variety of contexts (e.g. from the same PC to interact with a social networking site, their healthcare provider and their bank), identity technologies that are completely different and oblivious to each other, simply because they grew historically in different verticals, are not going to cut it any more. Users demand more service, which in this case means: “dear technologists, I don’t care about horizontal and vertical and all the reasons why those have been different in the past. Make my life easier, and more consistent, because I’m not going to change the way I interact with you just because it your technology history is different in your industry.” There is also the issue of cost and distribution: just like in the case of the CAD workstations, horizontal technologies have a cost advantage because development and other costs can be written off over many verticals, not just one as in case of vertical standards.
So my prediction is that horizontal identity technologies are going to continue to intrude on the turf of what so far have been vertical identity technologies, and ultimately will be very successful there, simply because the users demand it and there is a clear cost advantage. However, that only works once the verticals-specific bits of what’s needed in a particular vertical have been re-architected to work on top of the horizontal technology, instead of on those parts of the vertical technology that really only were defined in the vertical in the first place because no horizontal technology had been applicable at the time: in my diagram above, that means that where the boxes overlap, the horizontal technology wins out; the parts of vertical technologies that aren’t touched by the horizontal technology will remain in the vertical because without those, the value proposition in the vertical isn’t there. Note that this is exactly the dynamics of what happened with CAD workstations: hardware and operating system largely turned out to be horizontal technologies, while the applications were the parts specific to the vertical and stayed there (and by the way: has the market grown since! We can expect the same in identity as this transition occurs)
A rearrangement along these lines provides the best of both worlds: benefiting from the ubiquity and cost advantages of horizontal technologies wherever possible, while keeping (and now have been freed to even more intensely work on) the specifics in the various industries. If you are in a particular vertical and are looking at this situation related to identity, at NetMesh we would be happy to work with you to make this a reality.