* News from CA, Thor, DataPower
I’m at two different identity gatherings this week – the Digital ID conference in Denver and the Mobile ID Services event in San Francisco – so most of the new product announcements will show up in the newsletter over the next week or two (as well as, of course, my take on what’s new and exciting in the industry as a whole). But there are a few things to talk about, at least briefly, this week. So I will.
I had the chance to talk to Computer Associates’ senior vice president of eTrust security management, Toby Weiss, last week about CA’s recently announced acquisition of Netegrity. You may remember that a couple of weeks ago I quoted some industry bigwigs about this acquisition, and their consensus was that CA will have trouble integrating the acquisition, that it duplicates existing technologies at CA and that far from hurting the competition it will actually boost rivals’ bottom line.
According to Weiss, though, the Netegrity technologies complement, rather than duplicate, those CA already has. That’s a bit of a stretch (or, perhaps a bit of hyperbole), but there is at least a nugget of truth. CA traditionally served the “high end” of the market (its started in the mainframe world) while Netegrity has always been associated with the Wintel-desktop and client-server part of the networking market. There is a fair amount of overlap, of course, but Weiss believes that CA can successfully merge the technologies while keeping existing customers of both companies happy. Time will tell.
Thor Technologies has announced a partnership with MphasiS. MphasiS says of itself: “We focus on financial services, retail, logistics and technology industries, building on a platform of world-class IT and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) capabilities.” In English, that means it builds portals for businesses.
Up until now, identity services for portals were an afterthought, tacked on when someone realized that you needed to not only know who was accessing the portal, but to actually authenticate them in context – who they are, what they want, where they’re coming from, etc. Add-ons sometimes work and sometimes don’t.
John Aisien, Thor’s vice president of marketing and business development, notes: “Increasingly, enterprises are realizing that to efficiently leverage the portal’s promise of ubiquitous content delivery and seamless business transactions, it is imperative to introduce automation into user management processes, not just limited to the portal’s ID store, but across all connected resources. Call it enterprise portals finally growing up, or Portal v3.0!! What Thor and MphasiS is doing is basically ‘productizing’ a solution to help clients deliver Portal v3.0.”
Also newsworthy was a major move into the identity management space by DataPower, best known as a network management company. DataPower pioneered XML-aware networks (XAN) as the key to the transition from packet-orientation to application-orientation of data networks, where smart network equipment provides not just connectivity but also message-level security, routing, integration and acceleration.
The company’s strategy was built on two beliefs: first, that XML would become the dominant protocol for connecting disparate systems, and second, that only true network devices, rather than heterogeneous software, would be able to support the security, performance and simplicity required for wide adoption.
DataPower has discovered that identity, supported through XML, is a key component required to implement its strategy. Earlier this month, DataPower demonstrated real-world Web service deployments with customers using WS-Security and SAML for federated authentication and authorization across domains to partners and customers. These include such well-known identity management names as RSA, Netegrity, Oblix, CA, IBM, Oblix and Sun. You can check out the offerings at DataPower’s Web site, but to me the importance here is that more and more vendors are recognizing that identity management is the heart and soul of secure networking.
That’s all for now!
