Which company would you say is the oldest “pure play” provisioning company?

Anyone who said Business Layers or Oblix gets no credit. Although both were involved in provisioning from the beginning (defined as 1998), neither is still around as a “pure play” company - Business Layers was acquired by Netegrity which, in turn, was bought out by Computer Associates. Oblix was snapped up by Oracle earlier this year.

No, the longest-running company in pure play provisioning is also one of the least well known. Fischer International was founded in 1982 by Addison Fischer, who is still chairman of the board. While it didn’t do provisioning at the beginning (no one did), its long-running experience in the security arena gave it a leg up on the competition in provisioning, especially when single and reduced sign-on, password reset and other security-conscious services are taken together with provisioning to create a well-integrated identity management suite.

And “well integrated” is a key concept to Fischer CEO Renée Bacherman. In a conversation last week, she talked about what she referred to as the last generation of services and applications, “applications layered on top of and beside other applications without regard to integration, correlation, business processes.”

She continued:

“This resulted in numerous and complex islands of automation. Organizations constantly struggle to integrate these islands of automation to better exploit their technology investments. Organizations have too much data and too little information because the business process view is buried within many different applications. Automated business process management and compliance require integration technology for organizations to fully realize the potential of their technology investments.”

Bacherman calls Fischer’s technologies the “next generation” of identity management:

“Architecture is key. Only an identity management solution that is built as an integration technology can quickly be assimilated into an enterprise. These solutions must replicate the hub-and–spoke and publish-and-subscribe architectures that the EAI [enterprise application integration] vendors developed. Since this technology inherently enables the business process view, it facilitates the ability to include compliance by design. Identity management delivers a centralized point of administration, centralized audit database, out-of-the-box audit policies and assessment workflows, all of which are coexistent with the provisioning, password management, identity management and self-service functionality.”

Dave Kearns is a consultant and editor of IdM, the Journal of Identity Management.