Netegrity looks to ease mgmt., user access

WALTHAM, MASS. - Netegrity last week introduced IdentityMinder, workflow-based software for automating the management of user accounts and self-service password management.

Netegrity's IdentityMinder, which will be available for Solaris or Windows NT, competes against provisioning software from Waveset, IBM and Courion for centralizing administration of accounts and letting administrators delegate authority to decide access privileges. However, unlike its competitors, Netegrity has made use of its provisioning software dependent on the use of its access-control product, SiteMinder, used for Web portal security.

"It uses SiteMinder's access-control mechanism," says Netegrity's CTO Depak Taneja. "Initial customer demand for IdentityMinder will clearly be for those that already have SiteMinder installed." But Netegrity expects to gradually evolve IdentityMinder into a more independent product in the next few months. "We're clearly on a collision course with Waveset and the others in this market," Taneja says.

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WALTHAM, MASS. - Netegrity last week introduced IdentityMinder, workflow-based software for automating the management of user accounts and self-service password management.

Netegrity's IdentityMinder, which will be available for Solaris or Windows NT, competes against provisioning software from Waveset, IBM and Courion for centralizing administration of accounts and letting administrators delegate authority to decide access privileges. However, unlike its competitors, Netegrity has made use of its provisioning software dependent on the use of its access-control product, SiteMinder, used for Web portal security.

"It uses SiteMinder's access-control mechanism," says Netegrity's CTO Depak Taneja. "Initial customer demand for IdentityMinder will clearly be for those that already have SiteMinder installed." But Netegrity expects to gradually evolve IdentityMinder into a more independent product in the next few months. "We're clearly on a collision course with Waveset and the others in this market," Taneja says.

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The Java-based IdentityMinder is expected to ship by the end of the month and will cost between $1 and $11 per user for an existing SiteMinder customer, with pricing expected to be as much as $40 per nonuser.

IdentityMinder lets customers define user roles, organizations and groups the same way as is done with security policy in Netegrity SiteMinder. A customer can delegate user management of the account to business partners so they can manage their own users. It also is possible to establish a self-service help desk so that users can register on their own and reset passwords, if that is acceptable under the cooperate security policy.

Provisioning, or identity-managment software, has been slow to gain acceptance except for at large organizations willing to make a significant investment in software for automating a process that has traditionally been done manually for password management. The costs for provisioning software can easily reach into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

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