In our almost seven years as an organization, the FIDO Alliance has moved on an upward trajectory as it has achieved a number of significant milestones. Starting as a small group of just six companies, the Alliance has seen hundreds of organizations contribute to our specifications and related certification and market development programs.
Beginning with a focus on two specifications addressing distinct use cases, we now have also released FIDO2 in conjunction with W3C, which builds upon this original vision and brings expanded capabilities. Our certification program has had meteoric growth and has seen nearly 600 products complete conformance and interoperability testing. And on top of this, we’ve had various deployment-related initiatives across the globe.
All of this growth has been led by members on our Board of Directors in conjunction with our founding executive director, Brett McDowell. Over the past seven years, Brett has grown an excellent team to address the industry. With this growth comes change. As the Alliance enters this exciting next chapter, Brett McDowell is taking on added professional projects in the industry in addition to his role as FIDO Alliance executive director. Specifically, he will be leveraging his deep experience managing multi-stakeholder industry bodies to advise Hedera Hashgraph Council as its executive director. The Alliance is grateful for his ongoing service and for the work he’s done to bring the organization to this point.
The stage is now set for for 2019 to be a year of widespread deployment and adoption of FIDO solutions — particularly with FIDO2 now in market. And the Alliance’s work is just beginning. The specifications and certification programs are continuing to evolve, and our deployment work is taking on even greater importance. Additionally, the Alliance has launched study groups to evaluate new work areas in IoT and eKYC, which would leverage the Alliance’s broad coalition of leading organizations from around the world to help standardize technologies adjacent to user authentication.
Moving forward, the Alliance’s officers and Board of Directors, led by Sam Srinivas of Google as president and Sean Estrada of Amazon as vice president, will continue to guide the organization alongside the senior executive staff of FIDO Alliance. We look forward to seeing how all of these changes help us move closer to reducing the world’s over-reliance on passwords.
