SAN DIEGO -- Start-up Symplified emerged from stealth mode Wednesday with an identity service designed to help corporations cut costs and complexity while securely attaching to Web-based resources.

The company introduced a hosted subscription service that lives on the Web, as well as a router-like appliance companies can install locally that is remotely managed by Symplified. The hosted service and the managed router provide the same service, and users choose one or the other as their deployment option. The company made the announcement at the annual Burton Group Catalyst Conference.

The Symplified service helps users ease the integration of their identity infrastructure, including access policies with online services and applications that run on an intranet or are hosted by such third parties as Salesforce.com. The start-up, based in Boulder, Colo., says its goal is to take the software out of the identity equation and give users a sort of middleware that provides Web single-sign-on, access control, auditing and identity virtualization.(Compare Identity Management products.)

"The way we solve the cost and complexity of the identity-software problem is get rid of the software," says Eric Olden, co-founder and CEO of Symplified. "We are the Postini of identity," he says.

Olden is a seasoned veteran in the identity game, having co-founded Securant, a Web access-management platform that he sold to EMC's RSA division in 2001.He and Symplified CTO Darren Platt authored protocols that eventually led to today's Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) standard.

Symplified uses SAML along with such techniques as form stuffing, SSL and message-digest as the plumbing in its service "How we simplify is that we get the gory details away from people," Olden says. Those details include all the hooks needed to securely connect to services.

The Symplified service authenticates a user, creates a session, authorizes the user and audits activity. Symplified engineers create integrations with specific services on the Web, then provide a single activation button within the Symplified interface so users get single-click activations. Users get provisioning and deprovisioning capabilities that are synchronized with their existing user management. The company provides a drop-down menu of the available services it supports and can create additional integrations with available intranet applications or services.