Combining portal and security technologies, Netegrity Inc. is building a new type of platform to provide secure application delivery and give IT managers a single point of administration for managing application access.
The Netegrity SRM (Secure Relationship Management) Platform will provide an alternative to integration partnerships between portal and security vendors, which officials said is insufficient to handle the security demands of Web application services.
The offering, based on the Waltham, Mass., companys SiteMinder security technology, will be rolled out piecemeal through the end of the year, starting with the release of Netegrity Portal Server next month. That product, the result of Netegritys acquisition of DataChannel Inc. in December, will provide the presentation and interaction layer for the shared services that make up the rest of the platform.
Those services will include identity management, role definition and entitlement management to control what applications and documents users can access. Provisioning services will automate the process of granting employees, partners and suppliers access to the applications they need.
In May, Netegrity will release Transaction-Minder to provide access control through major application servers. The identity management and entitlement management pieces should be in place by the third quarter, Netegrity officials said. Provisioning services will be delivered by the end of the year. The company will likely acquire a vendor that provides such services between now and then, officials said.
The SRM platform will include a management dashboard to provide a single point of administration for IT managers, who will use it for such activities as backups, audits and report generation.
Advantage Sales and Marketing Inc., of Irvine, Calif., plans to beta test Netegrity SRM. The company has to control access to customer-specific information on its extranet as well as human resources and benefits information for its internal users on its intranet, which use the same system, said Kat Lemons, national Web department manager.
“Its a very complex structure,” Lemons said. “We have 9,000 associates and between 3,000 and 4,000 external users who all log in to the portal and need to see different information.
“Were excited about getting a first-rate system, built on SiteMinder, that can control the [digital] certificates more tightly and securely,” Lemons said. “We need to make sure our different teams stay separate.”