Calendra Brings LDAP Product to U.S.

Calendra Inc., a French company specializing in directory content access and management software, has established a beachhead in North America, the company announced last week.

Calendra, which develops the CDM (Calendra Directory Manager) software, has set up sales offices in Herndon, Va., and San Francisco. It plans to target Fortune 500 and Global 2000 enterprises, as well as major software developers, officials said.

Headlining its offerings is Version 3.0 of CDM, which will be generally available at months end. The software is a design and development environment for building LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) applications, such as white pages, yellow pages, single sign-on, provisioning and delegated administration, for any directory-based content.

This version features a multitiered architecture that includes layers for presentation, business rules and abstraction logic, designed to make application design easier and components reusable. CDM applications designed in 3.0 will be able to access more than one LDAP directory data source, said officials at Calendra, based in Aubagne, France.

In addition, the Design Studio portion of CDM now boasts a wizard for assembling the presentation layer GUI and application logic.

CDM 3.0 supports SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) and WSDL (Web Services Description Language) for Web services. SOAP clients may now request LDAP directory Web services from CDM allowing programmers to LDAP-enable any application.

Company officials declined to comment on the pricing for CDM 3.0 but said typical implementations usually run from $50,000 to $300,000. The company has about 100 customers, mostly in Europe.

Although Calendra is new to the United States, the type of LDAP technology it brings is not, according to Aberdeen Group Inc. analyst Michael Hoch, in Boston. Calendra will compete with role-based access control software such as Quest Software Inc.s FastLane Active-Roles and provisioning software such as Business Layers Inc.s eProvision Day One and Access360 Inc.s enRole.

"Identity management is an important part of Web-based and Web-enabled businesses, and directories are a key part of that strategy," Hoch said. "Tools like this are important even though most companies havent moved that far along the Web services model yet.

"I like [Calendras] use of Java to run the application and that theyre trying to be so broad-based in working with as many directory vendors as possible. Thats a good way to go," Hoch said.