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

Pushing its solidarity and integrated functionality, Netegrity will launch a new version of IdentityMinder this week, featuring integrated identity and access management across Web and enterprise environments, said Deepak Taneja, CTO of Waltham, Mass.-based Netegrity. Available in late June, the upgraded product offers improved password synchronization and management, roles-based provisioning policies, and auditing and reporting tools. IdentityMinder will be offered as a Web Edition for Web-based applications and a Provisioning Edition to automate identities in enterprise applications, networks, and databases.

Tivoli is also set to release Tivoli Identity Manager in a few months. In anticipation, IBM Corp. is designing APIs to integrate with other systems not related to security, said Jeff Drake, director of Tivoli security strategies at Austin, Texas-based IBM Tivoli. And to cater to customers who only need specific but common feature sets without all the components of IBM’s access manager and risk products, Big Blue has created but not yet announced Tivoli Identity Manager for Portals.

The new products join a stream of high-profile partnerships that have touted a well-oiled provisioning and user-management model. These ID management deals (some hastily arranged) between Entrust Inc. and Waveset Technologies Inc., BMC Software Inc. and Oblix Inc., and Sun Microsystems Inc. and Thor Technologies Inc. have made it extremely difficult for customers to evaluate the technology relationship, said analyst Jonathan Penn at Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass. Additionally, integration complexity, infrastructure flexibility, and broad support of third-party technology concerns have left some companies reluctant to embrace a two-fisted approach to ID management.

"Attempting to do best-of-breed integration between (ID management) competitors didn’t seem like a great strategy for us as an enterprise," said Giuseppe Cimmino, director of corporate systems architecture at Discovery Communications in Silver Spring, Md. "The combined power of a (single vendor) integrated package is what we wanted to go with."