Jamcracker Inc. is the latest ASP to turn its intellectual property into new products, launching a new Pivot Path identity management suite, according to company officials.
The Santa Clara, Calif., application service provider leveraged the platform it created for its ASP service. Pivot Path provides single sign-on, access management and user provisioning.
“What we lived through as a managed services provider we are seeing in spades today in the enterprise. There is a need for a single infrastructure that deals with the complexity of managing both user access and provisioning of services in Web environments,” said Todd Johnson, president of Jamcracker.
The Pivot Path platform, which includes multiple modules that provide developer, identity management and help desk services, provides access management, policy-based provisioning, user management, delegated administration and self-service help desk capabilities. It automates tasks such as adding and deleting user profiles and provisioning users for services, and it integrates with directory services.
When users log in to Pivot Path, they are authenticated, and the software checks a central database to determine which applications they are provisioned for.
“We paint in our own portal or in the users portal a single-sign-on launch bar with icons that represent applications that have been provisioned and authorized. Users just click on those icons, and their credentials are passed among those applications,” said Johnson.
Some ASP customers already working with the tool find it to be quite flexible. “We can set up all those services ourselves. And it doesnt matter whether the service is internal on our network or an external service from a partner. We dont have to rely on Jamcracker to make a new service available,” said one user, who asked not to be named.
The platform includes a catalog of adapters for enterprise client/server applications that provide control over changes as users are added. It also includes some 400 Java APIs that developers can access.
The tool supports J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) and Microsoft Corp.s .Net applications and runs on a variety of platforms, including Solaris, Linux and Microsofts Windows NT. It also works with J2EE Web application servers, such as BEA Systems Inc.s WebLogic and the open-source JBoss.