Jericho Forum: Visionaries with a visibility problem

For example, the first rule that companies must follow to win compliance with The Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council standards is that you must have a firewall.

And PCI Council's general manager Bob Russo said in a recent interview that he'd never even heard of the Jericho Forum. He added if he understood their objections to firewalls and what alternatives there might be, the Council might consider changing the firewall rule.

Simmonds acknowledges one of the biggest problems the Jericho Forum faces is "oddball regulations" that run counter to Jericho Forum's vision of what progress would be.

But even more disconcerting is the fact that the group, in some cases, isn't having much of an impact among some of its own members.

John Bratkovics, global head of networks, voice and collaboration for Europe-based investment firm Dresdner Kleinwort, a Jericho Forum member, says he's vaguely aware of Jericho, but he's not directly involved with it, as it remains in an area managed by others.

That's not to say the Jericho Forum isn't gaining some traction. It does have 60 dues-paying members, two-thirds of whom are end users. The rest are vendors, including major players such as Symantec and Electronic Data Systems.

Plus, representatives from Microsoft, Oracle and Juniper, among others, routinely show up at the group's monthly meetings in places such as London, New York and San Francisco. Sometimes they're given an audience to discuss their product development; sometimes they just listen, trying to get a bead on what the Jericho Forum really wants.

This isn't necessarily easy, as the group elaborates its vision at a pretty abstract level. The latest Jericho publication is a position paper titled "Collaboration-Oriented Architectures," (COA) authored primarily by Seccombe.

The document describes an online contract-management repository of the future that includes a "reputation repository" that can record a user's actions and compare them with applicable contracts and be audited.

Seccombe, who discussed the COA framework last April in San Francisco as it was first published, said that although COA doesn't exist today as embodied in IT products, there are many companies, including Eli Lilly, which need COA-like software systems to efficiently manage the multitude of collaborative relationships among customers, manufacturers and in outsourcing. Simmonds says Jericho plans more on COA this fall.

"Generally speaking, they're doing a good job in explaining how the network looks today and how it can look in the future," says Juniper's director of product management, Brian Lazear, who attended a Jericho Forum meeting earlier this year. "They're trying to create nimbleness in the network."

But Lazear acknowledges that "it's difficult to have the access control and support the goals you want without the legacy firewall," adding that Juniper's strategy today centers around its Unified Access Control technologies based on the Trusted Computing Group's open standards for network-access control.