New Software Helps Companies Manage and Protect Data, Computer Systems and Applications While Simplifying Access for Partners

ARMONK, NY - 17 May 2005: IBM today announced new identity management software built on open standards -- designed to help customers securely manage employee, partner, customer and other third party user access to corporate applications and critical data -- as the border between an organization's network and outside networks blur.

This offering delivers another major step in helping customers transform their business operations into an on demand environment. Customers can evaluate their business designs, processes and infrastructure to build responsive and automated IT environments.

IBM's new IBM's Tivoli Federated Identity Manager® software helps simplify identity management and security between business and application silos. The software allows companies to connect islands of identity and security information into a cohesive, easy to manage, secure system into the overall network infrastructure.

Identity management has increasingly become a complex issue for businesses today. Developing secure identity and authentication processes within a company can be extremely costly and time consuming, and the challenge increases when extending it to third parties.

The new solution allows for simplified user registration and sign on for internal and external services across the company and their partners' Web sites, as well as automating the creation and deletion of accounts.

It also securely links employees and customers to third party services, such as employees to their benefits provider sites, without having to provide yet another user ID and password or having to re-authenticate the user -- a costly process for companies.

IBM Tivoli Federated Identity Manager helps companies avoid replicating user account administration by leveraging their business partners' identity management and authentication. It also helps reduce misuse and leakage of identity. Today, there is no standards-compliant way for companies to trust each other; therefore, companies locally create user accounts and passwords, which can increase the cost of managing user accounts and create exposures for user identity information.

As a result, customers will no longer have to manually design IT processes individually within their own silos of operation, and then hand-code their integration across different departments. Instead, they can design IT processes once and automate their integration across all areas of operation, saving time and money.

IBM's Tivoli Federated Identity Manager offers:

--Standards-Based Single Sign On - avoids the need for users to "sign in" again when accessing additional third party services such as benefits information, ring tones, traffic updates, online gaming and mobile banking. Direct access to the additional services provides added convenience to users, enabling companies to improve employee productivity, attract new subscribers and reach out to new markets.
   
--Integration of Business Silos - provides a simple and cost effective way to integrate business silos within companies that don't share a common security infrastructure, a typical result of mergers and acquisitions. This significantly reduces the cost of identity infrastructure management by eliminating redundant identity systems or platforms for customer ID management.
   
--Better Compliance - Identity authentication and account life cycle management is governed by the organization most closely associated with the user, improving compliance and corporate governance audit readiness.
   
--Improved Customer Care - consolidates customer care systems so companies can have a "holistic" view of their customer across their business silos. For example, although a user may receive one bill for multiple services (e.g. DSL, wireless and standard phone), they may have to call different customer care numbers for each account. With account linking, companies can view all customer accounts and provide access to new premium services.
   
IBM has been working closely with companies and standards organizations to drive support for federated identity standards. Tivoli Federated Identity Manager supports Liberty, SAML, WS-Federation, WS-Security and WS-Trust standards and specifications.

IBM is leveraging relationships with hundreds of business partners that already integrate with IBM's identity management software to help speed deployment of Tivoli Federated Identity Manager. IBM Business Partners such as DataPower, Layer 7 Technologies, Reactivity, Sarvega and VeriSign are actively working with customers to deploy solutions using Tivoli Federated Identity Manager.

"Businesses want to interact more efficiently with business partners and customers, but the concern is, how do you securely exchange user information between trusted providers and still achieve compliance objectives?" said Arvind Krishna, vice president of provisioning and security development, Tivoli Software, IBM. "Business agility is very important, and decreasing the time that it takes to securely integrate your partner ecosystem is a fundamental capability that all businesses need to address. IBM has delivered a solution based on standards that builds the management capabilities into the actual infrastructure -- which lets customers focus on their own core businesses."

According to an April 2005 Burton Group report, the increased emphasis on identity federation is the outgrowth of an industry-wide trend toward service-oriented architectures. Fueling both of these trends is businesses' need to interact more efficiently with partners and customers.(1)

Tivoli Federated Identity Manager uses the IBM Integrated Solutions Console, a self-managing autonomic technology that helps IT administrators by aggregating various user interfaces into a single console or "dashboard."

IBM's Federated Identity Management solution integrates with third-party portals, XML firewalls and application servers, as well as the IBM WebSphere middleware platform, including WebSphere Application Server, WebSphere Portal and WebSphere Business Integration Solutions.

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