David BicknellThe main provider of a business-to-business Internet commerce
"trust" system has admitted that it is up to three months behind
schedule in offering its services.
Identrus hoped to be up and running in March this year, ready
for an expected thaw in Y2K spending freezes as users began
investing in business-to-business commerce. But complexity in
constructing business rules to enable "trust services" - ie using
digital certificates to guarantee identity - and uncertainty among
Identrus member banks, including leading UK banks such as Barclays,
over what services they want to offer has held up progress.
Now, Identrus does not expect to be offering services before
June.
One of Identrus' problems has been the need to satisfy rigorous
regulatory concerns from the Federal Reserve Board over the
provision of banking services in an area that is largely untried
and untested.
"There have been a few things that have held things up," said an
Identrus spokeswoman in the US. "Getting the business rules
together has been complex, and we don't have too good a sense of
the timing of what individual banks are doing. But we expect to be
delivering digital certificates to them that they can deploy in
services from June onwards."
She added that the level of complexity required to satisfy what
are still untried rules on issues such as liability in the
provision of trust services was "pretty deep". Further delays have
been caused by a debate over Identrus' pricing. The problem stems
from whether the model should be based on transactions or a monthly
service fee.
Meanwhile, Identrus anno-unced it has 18 e-commerce suppliers'
security technologies interoperating seamlessly on a pilot network.
The network - featuring technologies from Baltimore, Entrust,
nCipher and VeriSignIt - is claimed to be the first global public
key infrastructure to use technologies from multiple suppliers.