Stories about: Oblix

Netegrity this week rolled out a new version of its IdentityMinder software featuring integrated user administration and resource provisioning capabilities.

Identity management vendors, including Netegrity Inc. and Tivoli Systems Inc., are bringing new products into an increasingly crowded arena.

A University of Texas student steals 55,000 Social Security numbers from the school's administrative databases. A UBS Pain Webber system administrator activates a logic bomb in the company's network, causing US$3 million in damage. A disgruntled Australian IT employee commandeers his company's sewage management software to dump hundreds of thousands of litres of raw sewage into local parks and rivers.

Oblix has released a new version of its NetPoint identity management and access control software designed to allow online business partners to securely exchange information across corporate boundaries.

The race to offer integrated identity management software packages heated up Thursday with the announcement that identity and access management company Netegrity Inc. will license provisioning components of Business Layers Inc.'s eProvision Software.

Sun Microsystems Inc. Monday released SunONE Identity Server 6.0, one of the first commercially available products to support two key standards for unifying user identity credentials.

Members of the OASIS interoperability consortium approved the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) on Wednesday as an OASIS open standard. The move paves the way for the XML-based framework to enable secure SSO (single sign-on) and other security functions for Web services transactions spanning multiple hosted sites.

Atreus Systems Corp., which develops user management software for service providers, is stepping into the corporate world with software designed to make it easier for large organizations to automatically manage user identification and control user access to network resources.

Michael Barrett, vice president of Internet systems for American Express, recently took over as president of the Liberty Alliance Project, a consortium developing a "federated identity" system aimed at simplifying and securing Internet transactions through use of a universal digital ID card. Barrett recently spoke with John Fontana about where the alliance is headed and why the effort is so important to American Express.

Software vendors are introducing a slew of products that aim to reduce the growing complexity of managing user identities and controlling access to applications scattered across internal and external systems.

Who are you, what do you want, and are you approved? These banal questions -- if answered -- could save IT operations money and foster a better, more personalized user experience.