NTT joins management board members from AOL, Ericsson, Fidelity Investments, France Telecom, General Motors, HP, IBM, Intel, Novell, Oracle, RSA Security, Sun Microsystems and Vodafone in driving the strategic direction of Liberty Alliance on a global basis.

NTT has been a member of Liberty Alliance for the past four years and is active in a number of Liberty programs including Liberty's Technology Expert Group (TEG), the Japan Special Interest Group, the Strong Authentication Expert Group (SAEG), the Payments Special Interest Group and the Identity Theft Prevention Group. NTT regularly participates in Liberty's conformance events and has products available today that are among the over seventy identity solutions from multiple vendors that have passed interoperability testing for Liberty Federation and Liberty Web Services.

The addition of NTT to Liberty's management board comes at a time when the adoption of Liberty's open identity standards and user-centric identity management capabilities are increasing around the world. With organizations deploying Liberty Federation and Liberty Web Services across vertical market segments, Liberty expects that there will be well over one billion Liberty- enabled identities and devices by the end of this year, with nearly 700 million in the global telecom and service provider sectors.

"As momentum for Liberty's open user-centric management capabilities continues to grow, we welcome NTT to the Liberty Alliance management board," said George Goodman, president of the Liberty Alliance management board and director, Platform Capabilities Lab at Intel. "With today's news, NTT has expanded its relationship within Liberty to further advance the deployment of Liberty Federation and Liberty Web Services worldwide."