While I was writing this newsletter last week the press was rampant with rumors of an IBM buyout of Sun. Such a deal would dramatically change the identity management landscape, but it's not what I want to talk about today. Instead, we'll look at news from a group of former Sun employees in Austin, Texas. Surprisingly, though, this isn't about SailPoint.

There’s another group of ex-Sun ID wizards who have launched a new enterprise, called UnboundID. Steve Shoaff (CEO), Don Bowen (VP of Marketing/Business Development), David Ely (Director of Engineering) and Neil Wilson (Chief Architect) are all veterans of Sun’s Identity business who got together to do some things they felt were needed in the market.

The first of those things was unveiled last week: UnboundID announced the availability of its flagship product, the UnboundID Directory Server. This is a new class of LDAP v3-compliant directory services software, designed to support the continued adoption and scale of distributed business and consumer applications, including the popular texting and smartphone applications that people use every day to work and interact. It was also announced that Alcatel-Lucent is the exclusive reseller of this technology to the global telecommunications market, and will add the UnboundID platform to its Subscriber Data Management portfolio under the name of the Alcatel-Lucent 8661 Directory Server.

The server is built on the OpenDS directory server foundation that most of the UnboundID founders developed while at Sun, but it’s been extended to improve both its scale and its performance.

According to UnboundID founder Don Bowen, who I spoke with last week, “The UnboundID Directory Server helps organizations meet today’s challenges head-on with a unique design that combines the best of both the directory server and the database into a single identity management product. The result is the ability to address billions of entries and transactions simultaneously.” Among the key benefits he noted were:

• Enhanced Performance – The new service offers 3-5X increase in performance vs. current market competitors and superior response time with less than a millisecond for read/write operations through advanced state-of-the-art information storage techniques.
• High Availability – With no single point of failure, UnboundID Directory Server provides high availability and lightning fast import, startup, backup and recovery as well as improved data redundancy.
• Proven Efficiencies – It can reduce a company’s directory server equipment and storage footprint by up to 80%, extending equipment lifetime and value while lowering costs and capital expenditures.

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