Waveset Technologies Inc. expected to release an extension to its user management product that will tie together extranets.
The company is introducing Lighthouse for Extranets to provide corporations with the ability to manage user identity and access permissions across any number of companies and directories that support Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP).
The release highlights a trend that has makers of account management products – often called provisioning software – and makers of single sign-on Web-access management software realizing that corporations prefer both abilities in a single suite. Customers say they want the ability to automate the creation, deletion and management of user identity and permissions, and the ability to manage access.
Waveset provides provisioning software and has partnerships with Web-access management vendors Netegrity Inc. and Oblix Inc. It will now compete with those partners in the area of extranet user account management. Earlier this year, Oblix introduced its CoreID product, and Netegrity launched IdentityMinder, both focus on extranet user account management.
However, Waveset officials say they won’t go as far as adding access management software to the company’s Lighthouse suite, which includes Provisioning Manager, Password Manager, Identity Broker, and Audit and Reporting.
With customer demands becoming more sophisticated, however, Waveset has to keep up.
“The access management and provisioning markets are getting increasingly competitive,” says Chris King, an analyst with Meta Group Inc. He says Waveset is different from Netegrity and Oblix in that those companies’ products manage users within the boundaries of their own software, while Waveset does it across directories without moving data.
To do that, Waveset has developed the Virtual ID Manager, one of the key features of Lighthouse for Extranets. It creates a repository of virtual pointers to data stored in directories. That way a user’s identity and access rights scattered across any number of directories for Web-based applications can be collated into a single view.
From there, Lighthouse for Extranets provides Delegates Administration, a feature that lets a corporation delegate to business partners the responsibility for managing their own users. The software also has self-service features that let end users reset passwords, and request or subscribe to certain services.
“We are solving the problem of providing a centralized view and control over identity permissions and profiles that are proliferating in the extranet,” says Kevin Cunningham, vice president and co-founder of Waveset.
The software is priced at US$75,000 for the server and up to US$3 per user. Lighthouse for Extranets is shipping now and runs on Hewlett-Packard Co. HP-UX 10.x and 11i, Microsoft Corp.’s Windows 2000 and NT, and Sun Microsystems Inc.’s Solaris 7.0, 8.0 and 9.0.
