Federated identity is a topic of widespread interest — yet the level of interest outpaces the market's embrace of the technology. Federation's current adoption rate (less than 5%) is indicative of process and technology issues: difficulties in forming many-to-many trust relationships, incompatible protocols, and performance problems. In Forrester's assessment, widespread adoption of federation will not happen before 2009, but keep your eye on recent developments: OpenID, Bandit, Microsoft's Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS), digital identities issued by governments, and Project Concordia.