HP buys identity vendor

HP Wednesday turned a licensing agreement into an acquisition when it signed a deal to buy Trustgenix, which develops a federated identity server.

HP has been working for the past few years on bolstering its identity management wares as part of its OpenView platform. Last year, HP signed a licensing deal with Trustgenix that materialized as HP’s Select Federation server. In July, HP announced upgrades to that product along with upgrades to Select Identity, which is provisioning software that the company acquired when it bought Trulogica in March 2004, and Select Access, which is Web access management software it acquired from Baltimore Technologies in 2003. The upgrades centered on automation and reporting features, as well as improved integration among the applications.

Terms of the Trustgenix deal were not disclosed, but it is expected to close in the next 30 days. The deal leaves Ping Identity as the only independent player in the identity federation server market.

To continue reading, register here and become an Insider. You'll get free access to premium content from CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, and Network World. See more Insider content or sign in.

HP Wednesday turned a licensing agreement into an acquisition when it signed a deal to buy Trustgenix, which develops a federated identity server.

HP has been working for the past few years on bolstering its identity management wares as part of its OpenView platform. Last year, HP signed a licensing deal with Trustgenix that materialized as HP’s Select Federation server. In July, HP announced upgrades to that product along with upgrades to Select Identity, which is provisioning software that the company acquired when it bought Trulogica in March 2004, and Select Access, which is Web access management software it acquired from Baltimore Technologies in 2003. The upgrades centered on automation and reporting features, as well as improved integration among the applications.

Terms of the Trustgenix deal were not disclosed, but it is expected to close in the next 30 days. The deal leaves Ping Identity as the only independent player in the identity federation server market.

Earlier this month, Trustgenix released IdentityBridge 2.5, a server focused on federating identities among companies or corporate divisions that includes support for Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) 2.0, the latest version of the standards-based authentication protocol. The server also provides a framework for end users to manage their privacy.

Over the past few years, major vendors have been playing the identity consolidation game, which experts say is now coming to a close. Just last week, Oracle made two acquisitions - Thor Technologies and OctetString. Others such as BMC, CA, IBM, Microsoft, and Sun have been building identity suites through acquisition. Experts say HP is playing a catch-up role to these other vendors. Novell, which is rumored to be making an identity announcement next week, and RSA have largely built their suites internally.

Identity is becoming a hot IT topic as companies feel pressure from federal regulations and privacy issues.

Ping Identity, the lone independent in the federation market, doesn’t see the identity suite as inevitable.

“While the rest of the industry consolidates their functionality, Ping looks to provide modular, lightweight solutions built entirely on open standards,” says Andre Durand, CEO of Ping Identity. “Our customers have told us that they want loosely coupled, lightweight and standards-based solutions.  One of our larger customers actually referred to this as the 'anti-suite' approach.”

Durand says there seems to be two diametrically opposed forces at work within the identity management industry. “First, large security and identity management vendors are shoring up their product suites, looking to become sole-source providers of tightly integrated authentication, authorization, provisioning and federation functionality.
Simultaneously, customer requirements for cross-vendor, cross-company interoperability are driving new standards into each of these capabilities. The need for interoperability of authentication is what drove the need for federation ahead of the other elements within the identity management stack."