About Us

Reliable Identities
provides information and services to enterprises, governments, the military, developer communities and social networks that seek to improve security, manageability and responsiveness through the effective use of reliable Enrollment, Provisioning and Identity Management methods and technology; assisting in the optimum IDM innovation and implementation.

The Reliable ID Team

Peter Gregory, CEO
Wes Kussmaul, Founder and CIO
Joanna Lilly, Director of Enrollment Services
William Schmitt, Chief Architect
Dr. Peter Hadley, Director of Software Engineering

The Reliable Identities team represents decades of experience in the field of secure online spaces and establishment of authenticity.

Peter Gregory, Chairman & CEO

For 25 years Peter has been bringing valuable products to market from such fertile grounds as IBM Corporate Research and Xerox Corporate Research, working with Palo Alto Research Corp. Peter has been synthesizing compelling propositions in broad areas of security including advanced-tech wireless proximity and motion detection systems, Homeland Security nuclear/radiation and chemical threat identification networks, and advanced guard security constant-contact response networks adopted by the major US defense contractors. During the 1990s Peter built and led the technical and marketing teams for a company in the advanced credit-card fraud protection sector, guarding consumer financial transactions with PKI, biometrics and other proprietary image-matching technology from Kodak Image Laboratories. For the same company, Peter was responsible for delivering solutions destined for comprehensive grocer/retail and payroll disbursement financial ecosystems.

As CEO of Reliable Identities he is now bringing Reliable Identities’ high-trust, secure enrollment products and processes for Commercial/Industrial and Internet Social Networking authentication solutions.

Beyond delivering valuable market solutions, Peter is routinely responsible for considerable capital structuring and investor attraction. Peter has held board member positions with multiple regional New York investment organizations and coached CEOs in the realities and idiosyncrasies of raising capital. Peter has worked with business incubator directors throughout the US east coast from Boston to Miami. He holds advanced degrees in business and technology; an MBA from the University of Rochester and an MSEE from Rochester Institute of Technology.

Joanna Lilly, Director of Enrollment Services

A former Executive Director of the American Society of Notaries (ASN), Joanna brings extensive knowledge of notarial law, procedures and standards, to the management of our relationships with notaries, notary organizations, and government agencies around the world.

Ms. Lilly has served as Chief Editor of over 40 publications including American Notary, ASN’s quarterly magazine, and Notary Tipsheet, distributed to over 14,000 members. In the past six years, Ms. Lilly has written many noteworthy articles for the Society, including “The Unlawful Notary” in the Fourth Qtr. 1999 American Notary and was involved in the writing and editing of state-specific notary handbooks for Arizona, Delaware, DC, Florida, Georgia, Massachusetts, New Jersey, South Carolina, and Texas, and the Marriage Handbook for Florida, Maine, and South Carolina notaries.

Ms. Lilly has taught professional notary public courses in Florida for years, and collaborated on the creation of the Society’s classroom and online notary training programs for Florida and South Carolina, and on the 40-Hour ASN Instructor Certification Program. Her knowledge of proper notary procedures makes her a valuable and qualified Professional Notary Instructor.

Prior to her tenure with the Society, she worked for 3 years with Notary Public Underwriters (NPU), a large notary bond firm. There she marketed the company’s services and provided technical assistance, assisting and educating notary clients regarding proper notarial practice. Prior to NPU Ms. Lilly was with Capital City Bank.

Wes Kussmaul, CIO

Wes was the founder in 1981 of Delphi, “The Company that Popularized the Internet,” which began as the world’s first computerized encyclopedia and grew through the ’80s as a social networking service.

Delphi was sold to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation in 1993.

While CEO of Delphi, Mr. Kussmaul launched a spin-off company, Global Villages, Inc., to provide magazine publishers with the business planning, design, engineering, hosting, management, and promotion services that allowed them to offer online services to their subscribers and advertisers under their own name.

During that time Wes realized that the unboundedness of the Web posed obstacles to the kind of secure communities and reliable identities needed by publishers and other relying parties. In order to focus on the authenticity issue, Wes sold the hosting portion of Global Villages Inc. to NTT Verio. The continuing operation, of which Reliable Identities is a part, turned its attention to enrollment methods and digital identity certificate technologies that enable secure and reliable online spaces.

In 2002, while writing Quiet Enjoyment, a book about a world PKI based upon reliable identities, Wes was introduced to the leadership of the International Telecommunication Union’s World e-Trust Initiative, which was an attempt to actually implement the idea. Wes’s company became a charter signatory to the Initiative and a Sector Member of the ITU.

In 2007 the Secretary General of the ITU asked Wes to serve as a member of the High Level Experts Group in the ITU’s Global Cybersecurity Agenda. In 2008 Wes presented his QEI vision of an Internet PKI space with pervasive reliable identities to the United Nations World Summit on Information Society (WSIS).

Wes is an Individual Adherent of the International Union of Latin Notaries and has been appointed a Notary Ambassador by the National Notary Association. He received his BS in Physics from the University of Central Missouri in 1971 while stationed at Whiteman Air Force Base (SAC) and did graduate study in Business Administration at Boston University.

Peter Hadley, Director of Software Development

Dr. Hadley is responsible for development of many of the software components of the enrollment procedures of Reliable Identities. His previous experience includes developing a new email generating system and gift certificate customer acquisition application for Amazon.com, responsibility for all email systems at PlanetAll.com including automated generation and response, CTO at InfoDeal.com, and twenty-five years in consulting and university faculty positions.

Dr. Hadley received his Ph.D. and A.M. from Princeton University, M.S. from Northeastern University, and S.B. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Our History

Reliable Identities is a unit of The Village Group, Inc., a spinoff of Delphi Internet Services Corporation. Founded in 1981, Delphi earned its claim as “The Company That Popularized The Internet” by harnessing the popular curiosity that had grown around the early Internet during the time when its usage had been limited to researchers and academics. Delphi was the first to capitalize on the NSF’s lifting of the ban on commercial activity on the Net.


The Village Group had been launched as an independent spinoff of Delphi, and was not part of News Corporation acquisition. The company served magazine publishers and business clients by designing, building and managing their own private-label online services. During the next twelve years The Village Group provided business planning, design, engineering, hosting, management and promotion services for Digital Equipment Corporation, William F. Buckley’s National Review, BioTechniques, Hardcopy, International Business, Business Digest, and many other companies and magazines.

In 1998 The Village Group sold its hosting business to NTT Verio in order to focus its resources on meeting the need for reliable identities of participants in online spaces. Three years later the first component of the Quiet Enjoyment Infrastructure, the VIVOS™ Enrollment Workstation, was introduced. In 2002 The Village Group became a signatory to the International Telecommunication Union’s World e-Trust Initiative, whose goal is to bring the benefit of PKI-based authenticity to the online world.

Our Future

The world is coming to realize that it needs more than information highways. In the physical world, highways bring us to spaces called buildings where we can share information in ways that are private, secure, and manageable. Identity is the Foundation of Security™ and The Village Group is dedicated to providing our clients with the virtual equivalent of buildings, where bounded spaces for specific workgroups provide built-in security and manageability.

Reliable Identities is a Premier Partner in The QE Alliance.