Global competition frenetically drives the need to locate anyone or anything from anywhere at anytime using any device. A reliable and robust yet cost-effective global directory service storing relevant information on people, devices, objects, and applications is a core enabling technology of the Information Age. This new infrastructure must be fully accessible with a high level of trust and up-to-the nanosecond accuracy. The electronic foundation must permit people and computer applications to transparently and quickly search, locate and access information in order for leaders to make effective decisions wickedly fast.

In the embryonic days, directories were developed specifically for and joined at the hip to an individual application. The directory, an integral component of any system, typically contained information on authorized system users, their passwords, machine addresses, and application specific items such as permission levels. And, as the number of applications grew exponentially, so did the number of program-locked directories. Managing all those disparate directories became ever more labor and cost intensive. Administrators were constantly adding, deleting, modifying users and addresses and other assorted fields, updating, replicating and refreshing the directory. And, it was no picnic for the users either since they had to remember different log on names and passwords for each of the programs they used. For example, in a large organization with literally hundreds of directories, a user, John Smith, would be known as Smith III, John Allen in the Human Resources system, as JASmith in the e-mail address book, as JAS32 in NDS, as JSmith7 in...