* Why Persistent could be a bigger name
You would think that I’d be aware of a company that was almost 15 years old, had been in the identity management field for almost 10 years, had partnered with Oracle, Netegrity and Oblix and had deployed identity management solutions to IBM, Sun and Critical Path (among many others). You would think that this would be a company that I’d be familiar with. You would, of course, be wrong (else I would have started this piece differently!).
Persistent Systems was the very first software company established in Software Technology Park in Pune, India back in 1990. It now has offices in numerous countries, including a U.S. presence in Santa Clara, Austin, Texas and Waltham, Mass., with more than 1,200 employees. Persistent has developed, co-developed or instigated the creation of many, many drivers and connectors for meta- and virtual-directory solutions from multiple vendors. In fact, it first launched a product in the identity management space back in 1996 – before the term “identity management” was generally known. For more than five years, Persistent has sold and deployed the Persistent identity-management suite worldwide.
This suite (see https://www.persistent.co.in/products/products.html for the details that won’t fit here) consists of three parts:
1) enList Report Server – this provides ODBC/JDBC/SOAP access to directory servers by providing a relational view of the hierarchical LDAP data through an SQL92 compliant SQL engine for read-write access.
2) enQuire Directory Server – an LDAP V3 compliant Virtual Directory server which provides a hierarchical LDAP view of multiple heterogeneous data sources and can consolidate numerous identity fragments from heterogeneous back-end data sources.
3) enSure Synchronization Server – Meta-data driven synchronization of heterogeneous data sources – directories, databases, operating systems and applications – which also allows point-to-point or n-way synchronization of data.
Persistent also has a stable full of folks fully conversant with these servers who can help you customize and deploy them to best support your identity management projects. I was interested to hear about these services when I spoke to Hemant Ramnani, associate technical manager of Persistent’s identity management products division. But I sat up and really started taking notice when he told me what was in planning for an upcoming release:
* enRoBAC – Enables role based access control.
* enTrans – Enables transactions over LDAP.
Role-based access control is, of course, one of the technologies we think combines good identity management, good security and time-saving automation all of which means an improved bottom line (fewer losses, lower costs). But transaction-oriented LDAP appears to be something new.
Directory vendors that use SQL databases as their store (Oracle, Computer Associates, Critical Path, etc.) have long touted transaction-tracking technology as one way in which their products were superior to LDAP-based directories.
In a Transaction Tracking System (TTS), data is protected from corruption by backing out incomplete transactions that result from a failure in a network component. When a transaction is backed out, data is returned to the state it was in before the transaction began. If Persistent can implement this in a pure LDAP environment, then its name would be known far and wide.
