French LDAP Developer Storms U.S. Shores

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

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, official said and is also targeting the OEM channel, through such directory software providers as Oracle Corp., Microsoft Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc.s iPlanet division and Critical Path Inc., company officials said.

Just last week the company announced version 3.0 of CDM, which will be generally available at the end of the month. The software is a design and development environment for building LDAP applications, such as white pages, yellow pages, single sign-on, provisioning and delegated administration, for any directory-based content.

This version features a multi-tiered architecture that includes separate 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, which has headquarters in Aubagne, France.

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

Lastly, 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 making to LDAP-enable any application.

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