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Two leading identity management vendors are updating their product suites and expanding into areas such as federated ID management.
BMC Software Inc. planned to unveil in late June its new BMC Identity Management suite along with a road map of future releases. The news follows Sun Microsystems Inc.s announcement in June of additions to its Identity Management Portfolio that support federated identity networks.
The announcement comes as users demand that IAM (identity and access management) vendors address issues such as compliance, data privacy regulations and the growth of Web services deployments.
The BMC Identity Management suite will connect the companys various identity management applications with a common interface, company officials said.
The changes will integrate Web-based, single-sign-on and identity management technology BMC acquired from Calendra in January and OpenNetwork Technologies in March and make it easier for customers to navigate between applications in the suite, said Somesh Singh, vice president and general manager of BMCs Identity Management Business Unit.
A multiphase road map for the Identity Management suite laid out future releases in key areas such as access management, password management, user administration and provisioning. The company plans to announce new elements of the suite every six months.
The first of those products, BMC Compliance Manager, will be released in the third quarter. The centralized auditing product will aggregate and consolidate user profiles from different sources. Customers will be able to use Compliance Manager to determine which users can access which resources and where they received authorization to do so, BMC said.
Compliance Manager will be followed by BMC Atrium Identity Discovery, a tool that adds identity data to BMCs Configuration Management Database.
The company will also release BMC Federated Identity Manager, an application that will consolidate user identities and account information from different applications and from company and partner Web domains.
But Sun appears to have beaten BMC to the punch. The Santa Clara, Calif., company last week announced the availability of two new applications that expand Suns Identity Management Portfolio: Sun Java System Federation Manager and Sun Java System Identity Manager Service Provider Edition.
The products address pressing issues for Suns customers, such as regulatory compliance and identity theft, said Sara Gates, vice president and general manager of identity management at Sun.
Java System Federation Manager will allow companies to build federated identity services that connect two or more partners using Web services-based user authentication, Sun said.
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