Jamcracker Inc. on Tuesday will be the latest application service provider to turn its intellectual property into products when the company launches its new Pivot Path identity management suite.
The Santa Clara, Calif. company productized the platform it created for its ASP service that offers 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 environment,” said Todd Johnson, Jamcracker president.
The Pivot Path platform, which includes multiple modules that provide developer services, identity management and help desk services, offers access management, policy-based provisioning, user management, delegated administration and self-service help desk capabilities. It automates tasks such as adding and deleting of users and provisioning users for services, and integrates with directory services.
When users log into 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,” described Johnson.
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.
In addition, 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 application program interfaces that developers can access.
The tool supports both J2EE and .Net applications, and it can run on a variety of platforms including Solaris, Linux, and Windows NT. It also works with J2EE Web application servers such as Beas WebLogic and the open source JBOSS.