* Courion and Sun make moves to cut time taken to deploy provisioning systems
We’ve come a very long way in the identity provisioning field over the past eight years, a journey highlighted by two recent announcements. I’ll get to those in a second.
Back in late 1998, I came across the offerings from Business Layers and Oblix in the provisioning field (Business Layers approach is explained here). In essence, the client would buy the services of a group of consultants to come in and tailor scripts that created the workflow to enable the provisioning to happen. There was a workflow engine product, there were connectors to talk to the various directories, databases and applications, but the bulk of what the customer bought (for prices beginning at $30,000, plus $30 per managed account) was the services of the team of consultants. Even Novell – known more for its great technology and products – refused to sell its DirXML provisioning engine without also including a contract with its consulting services arm.
Fast forward to September 2006 and – just as back in ’98 – two leading companies in the provisioning field have made announcements that, in reality, bring us closer to commoditized products for provisioning.
Courion has just released its “Jump Start Options” package for the Courion Enterprise Provisioning Suite. What this does is provide out-of-the-box password and provisioning functionality, a way to get immediate and less costly benefits from the provisioning package without compromising the ability to implement further options, or modify them, in the future. Jump Start provides structured workflows for the most common provisioning and password management needs and requires no customization. This can enable an organization to quickly achieve some of the benefits of provisioning. Each option provides a full breadth of functionality, a subset of the corresponding enterprise version, without restricting the ability to further enhance the functionality later.
Courion’s first Jump Start options include:
* Basic Access – Enables business managers to quickly provision a new hire’s access to applications required to do his or her job.
* Admin New Hire – Provides IT administrators with one view for provisioning access to all new hires, offering a central location to monitor and control account access.
* Orphan Account Finder – Addressing one of the biggest security threats and compliance issues, this enables companies to quickly and easily identify orphan accounts that need to be removed, disabling access to those employees no longer with the organization.
* Account Termination – Provides a one-stop account-disable capability, enabling organizations to immediately terminate accounts as employees leave the organization.
* Password Reset – Provides self-service capabilities to set up password reset on Active Directory and Exchange. This enables the end user to reset their own password, significantly reducing help desk calls.
Not to be outdone, Sun too would like you to get up to speed with its identity management suite a lot faster. But rather than develop its own methodology, as Courion did, Sun went out and bought some in the shape of Neogent. Neogent is a longtime Sun identity partner, reselling Sun’s Java System Identity Access Management. It attracted attention because of its speed: it claims to be able to get Sun’s product up and running in an average of 45 days – much less than the one-year minimum most enterprises took when implementing the Sun suite. How did Neogent do it? The same way Courion has announced – it uses what it calls a “pre-integrated software bundle.”
What this means, though, is that the benefits of identity management suites should soon be within the budgets of most organizations, not just the large enterprises that can afford big consulting contracts. These are good signs.
