Integration features are tapped for federated ID

Federated identity management garnered significant attention last week, as vendors improved wares and announced forthcoming initiatives.

Free IT resource Hear how top CIOs turn change into a competitive advantage. Sponsored by HP Free IT resource Attend the SOA Executive Forum: Breaking SOA Bottlenecks SOAExecForum.com/may2007 Sponsored by InfoWorld

Hewlett-Packard unveiled privacy management improvements to its OpenView suite. Entrust and Trustgenix announced plans to integrate their respective products as a way to strengthen the security of federated identity management. And Sun Microsystems said it plans to open source its Web site authentication and single sign-on technologies through its newly created Open Source Web Single Sign-On project.

HP beefed up its OpenView identity management suite of applications with a number of federation and compliance features, while also agreeing to extend its existing technical agreement with Citrix Systems.

The HP announcements include the rollout of OpenView Select Federation 6.5, which includes privacy management improvements; OpenView Select Identity 3.3, which has improvements in administering to large-scale environments; and OpenView Select Access 6.1, which features the integration of the Citrix Password Manager.

"The maturing of HP's identity management suite reduces the integration burden and extends the value of HP's solution for its OpenView customers," said Phil Schacter, service director at Burton Group.

Entrust and Trustgenix in the third quarter will unveil a product that unites Entrust's IdentityGuard authentication technology with Trustgenix's IdentityBridge federated identity management software.

Sun will take three pieces of identity-management-related source code -- authentication, single sign-on, and agents -- into the open source world following the release of Version 7.0 of its Java System Access Manager security software in the fall.