HP adds identity wares to platform

HP last week added a new piece to its identity management lineup that is designed to allow companies to share identity information across corporate boundaries.

HP OpenView Select Federation, a gateway server that lets users share identities with business partners using standards-based protocols, is expected to ship early next year.

The company is licensing the technology from Trustgenix, which develops so-called identity federation software. Federation allows user credentials validated on one partner network to be used for access to services on another network.

HP's identity management lineup also includes Select Identity, provisioning software that it acquired when it bought Trulogica in March, and Select Access, Web access management software it acquired from Baltimore Technologies last year.

HP officials say that Select Federation rounds out the company's identity management suite.

"At this point we consider ourselves a mainstream identity management suite player with access management, provisioning, user management, single sign-on and federation capabilities," says Sai Allavarpu, director of product marketing for IT service management and identity management.

However, analysts say the company is still lacking pieces.

"They need a meta-directory component to actually round out their suite," says Earl Perkins, an analyst with the Meta Group. "With that they probably have all the makings of a full-service offering."

Others say HP is missing pieces such as password synchronization.

"These are some minor details, but you have to get to that level to say you have something complete," says Mike Neuenschwander, an analyst with Burton Group.

HP competes in this market with IBM, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle and Sun.

In October, IBM formed a partnership with Ping Identity and promised to recommend to IBM's smaller customers Ping's PingFederate server so they can integrate with larger partners who use IBM's Tivoli Federated Identity Manager. Last year, HP and Ping formed a partnership to work on development of SourceID, which is open-source identity federation software.

In July, Oracle acquired Phaos, another provider of federation software, and plans to add those wares to its Oracle Identity Management Solution.

HP plans to offer Select Federate in two versions. The Enterprise Edition is designed for corporate use. A Premium Edition is for telecommunications, mobile and business-to-consumer usage.

Select Federation includes a privacy manager so users can specify which attributes of an identity they want to share. It also supports multiple protocols and multiple versions of those protocols, including Security Assertion Markup Language 1.1 and 1.0, Liberty Identity Web Services Framework, Liberty Identity Federation Framework 1.1 and 1.2, Liberty Enabled Client Proxy, and Liberty Extended Profiles. Trustgenix plans to add support for WS-Federation, a protocol under development by IBM and Microsoft, but has not said when that will happen.

Select Federation integrates with directories that support Lightweight Directory Access Protocol and is Java-based software that will run on HP-UX and Sun Solaris. HP is developing a Linux version.