"People today, when they're serving their employees (utilizing directories), they're doing so in a way that is inefficient and isn't standardized. It's error prone and there's very little auditing involved," said Penn. "If they want to try to do that for business partners and customers they're going to need audit trails and compliance, accuracy, and better service through making changes faster and providing ways to empower the users to make changes themselves that are reflected instantly."
Penn said vendors equipped with broad portfolios pushing identity management, such as IBM and Novell, are sorely lacking tightly integrated products despite advertising otherwise.
Among the companies lining up behind Microsoft to court ID management dollars include Oblix and OpenNetwork Technologies, highlighted by announcements from each company on Wednesday.
Oblix said that its NetPoint identity management software would fully support Microsoft's identity management architecture including Active Directory and the MIIS 2003 product. Oblix's NetPoint product enables user data stored in Active Directory to be used for enterprise-wide identity management on corporate intranets and extranets, Oblix said.
"We support Microsoft's authorization manager, which allows our access server to manage (Microsoft's) authorization manager. That will be available as part of Windows Server 2003," said Prakash Ramamurthy, vice president of products and technology for Oblix in Cupertino, California. "So if you've already defined policies and rules in authorization manager, you can use our access server to point to and evaluate those policies."
OpenNetwork Technologies also announced that it is teaming with Microsoft to offer support for MIIS via OpenNetwork's Universal Identity Platform (IdP) 5.0. If customers build their infrastructure within a pure .Net environment, IdP uses ADAM and MIIS for back-end integration to the mainframe, according to Adrien Ransom, vice president of marketing and alliances for OpenNetwork in Clearwater, Florida.
"Any type of environment or resource that user is trying to access that is not supported by the MIIS engine our 'broker' will pick it up and extend to that their framework," including Rack F, and WebLogic and WebSphere on the back-end, noted Ransom.
(Paul Roberts is a correspondent for the IDG News Service, an InfoWorld affiliate.)
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