This week I'm at Digital ID World which means I get to chat with folks I haven't seen in a while but it also means it's officially awards season. In a session worthy of the Daytime Emmys, the Liberty Alliance once again passed out its awards to "…identity-based applications built using Liberty Federation (including SAML 2.0), Liberty Web Services, Liberty People Service and Liberty Advanced Client specifications." Yes, it's time once again for the Iddy Awards!

This year’s award winners were:

Aetna won the 2008 IDDY Deployment Award for an externally hosted online provider portal used for linking healthcare providers with health plans. Working with NaviMedix, the portal features a variety of tools including transactions and content hosted by Aetna with interfaces to third-party Internet application service providers and content service providers. The deployment is currently utilized by healthcare providers in all 50 states.

Citi won the 2008 IDDY Deployment Award for Citi’s Global Transaction Services, which provides managed identity services that help institutional clients utilize digital credentials and signature technologies in a comprehensive and legally binding manner. Citi is both a Credential Service Provider and a Relying Party as defined in the Liberty Identity Assurance Framework (IAF).

Deutsche Telekom walked away with the 2008 Multi-Protocol IDDY Award for its identity application designed to lower implementation barriers when it comes to the delivery of online/IP-based services to consumers. The application, which was initially launched in 2002 and won the 2006 IDDY Award, has been steadily enhanced to offer multi-protocol capabilities for service provider interfaces as well as for authentication methods and automatic user identification.

UNINETT won the 2008 Emerging Application IDDY Award for SimpleSAMLphp, an open source lightweight implementation of several federation protocols written in PHP. Free to download and available in 15 languages, simpleSAMLphp is a platform for quick implementation of emerging standards or identity-enabled proof-of concept (POC) applications.

The winners certainly are all worthy recipients, as documented in their presentations here at DIDW. And while I’m sure part of the reason the Liberty Alliance honors these folks is that it furthers the use of the alliance’s protocols, this does show how truly far we have come over the past 10 years since the original provisioning applications – the pioneers of identity management – first burst on the scene.

Dave Kearns is a consultant and editor of IdM, the Journal of Identity Management.