Suite Sounds Of Identity Management From BMC

Somesh Singh, vice president and general manager of BMC's identity management business unit, Houston, also outlined a yearlong development road map for the product.

Identity Management Suite has the keys to unlock and communicate with a greater number of customized, Web-based applications and esoteric third-party networks, said Singh. And by concentrating and improving on five management areas—directories, access, passwords, compliance auditing and provisioning—BMC plans to deliver an even more comprehensive suite by the end of 2006, he said.

"Customers should be able to deploy our suite and integrate it with home-grown and third-party applications easily, and by doing so extend our product," said Singh.

A component of BMC's overarching Business Service Management solution stack, Identity Management Suite can be used to securely link an enterprise customer's employees, business partners and customers while protecting sensitive data and ensuring a compliance-friendly audit trail, he said.

This fall, a new Web-based interface will appear along with the introduction of the BMC Compliance Manager auditing solution, BMC Federated Identity Manager for federated ID groups and BMC Atrium Identity Discovery—all of which will feed BMC's Configuration Management Database, a clearinghouse for best-practice configurations that enables the modeling of changes against known configurations.

Then later in 2006, BMC expects to complete the integration of a directory manager and a standardized, open API, which customers can use to share identity information across the five management areas.

Binod Singh, president and CEO of Ilantus Technologies, a global ID management integrator with offices in Houston, swears allegiance to BMC's Identity Management Suite. Ilantus' sales of BMC's identity management products have risen 100 percent year over year, and the BMC road map "is very timely" for the industry's needs, he said.

BMC's January purchase of French identity management vendor Calendra and its March acquisition of OpenNetwork Technologies, a Web-based application and extranet technology vendor in Clearwater, Fla., gave BMC the load-bearing elements of the new suite. The acquisitions also doubled the number of BMC's worldwide channel partners after grafting Calendra and OpenNetwork partner programs to its own, said BMC's Singh.