Some of the main concepts and principles in UMA. The UMA standard specifies RESTful interfaces and security models for interoperability between applications and service providers. UMA has built in hooks for custom business logic, integration with existing identity infrastructure, advanced reporting capabilities, etc... whatever your company needs to operate successfully online.
Amazon Web Services (AWS), PayPal, Google Checkout, Verisign branded credit card processing, Amazon's S3 hosting platform all participate in UMA ecosystem via open APIs. UMA is about customer control over data. It standardizes the user interface to all products & services making it easy for the end user to toggle their preferences and change which service providers they use in real time.
UMA was developed under the leadership of Scott Haugdahl (formerly at PayPal), Matt Thompson (PayPal) and Mike Hearn (Google). The project was sponsored by Verisign, EastBanc Technologies, PayPal and Google. After a recent change in sponsorship, the OpenUDID project took over responsibility for developing UMA.
If you are interested in participating publicly, please visit our community wiki page . We welcome your input! If you are interested in reading more about UMA, you can also check out the latest draft specification . The UMA standard is already implemented in many applications and services. Some of the main members include: PayPal, Google Checkout, Google Wallet, Verisign Credit Card Processing, EastBanc Technologies and i-Behavior (a member of the OpenUDID project).
UMA was designed to run anywhere. It has been successfully tested on many different platforms such as iOS for iPhone / iPod Touch / iPad using iTune's new In App Purchase feature; Android running on a variety of devices such as Droid X running CyanogenMod 7; Java ME phones such as Nokia S60 phones; Perl/XMLRPC web service backends such as Drupal or Wordpress plugins; Adobe AIR platform via Flash Builder and more.
Universal Market Access is a name that's exclusive to PayPal, according to a Google search which found only one hit for it except for mentions on 7 blogs all affiliated with PayPal people and one mentioning Verisign so the name is not generally used. Names like "Universal Market Access", "Open Payments", and "UMA" are confusingly similar to each other, which will cause confusion among users when they try to search for more information about them; these should be distinguished by an article title or section heading.
I came to this Wikipedia article after looking for information on "Open Payments". I'm sure there are many others who will be doing the same. Do you think changing all mentions of UMA in this article to "Open Payments" would be a good idea? It seems like that might solve the problem and still keep things clear and consistent with other articles. The point is that we're not just talking about PayPal her, we're talking about a broad initiative by multiple companies and organizations to unify payment standards. We shouldn't necessarily expect people to know what any of these names mean upfront without explaining them.
