HP rolls out improved identity suite

13.07.2005
Von Ed Scannell

Hewlett-Packard beefed up its OpenView identity management suite of applications on Wednesday with a number of federation and compliance features, and also announced it has agreed to extend its existing technical agreement with Citrix Systems.

The announcements include the rollout of Openview Select Federation 6.5, which contains privacy management improvements, OpenView Select Identity 3.3, which has improvements in administering to large-scale environments, and OpenView Select Access 6.1, which features the integration of the Citrix Password Manager.

The new releases will better enable corporate users to operate their companies more as a set of business processes and services instead of just as a set of servers and applications, according to Todd DeLaughter, vice president and general manager of HP"s Management Software Business.

"We really see the improvements here as helping customers to better meet their security and compliance requirements, and at the same time be able to effectively manage ongoing business growth and change," DeLaugther said.

Besides improvements to privacy management, Select Federation 6.5 also features consolidated audit and reporting on administrative, privacy, and transactional processes. The new version also supports SAML 2.0 and the Liberty Alliance Identity Web Services Framework, and offers an expanded software developer"s kit.

"One of the themes of the announcements is the integration of the products in the suite. So with Federation as part of the suite users can now integrate all the auditing and reporting on various transactions like privacy controls and transactions so everything can be consolidated and sent to a central audit server. Users do not have to manually collect the log record from each application and then manually correlate them to figure out what happened," said Sai Allavarpu, director of product management and marketing for HP"s Security and Identity Software.

Some industry observers see the arrival of the updated suite as a step forward in HP"s identity management strategy.

"The maturing of HP"s identity management suite reduces the integration burden and extends the value of HP"s solution for its OpenView customers,"said Phil Schacter,vice president and service directorat the Burton Group. "Identity and access management services are a critical component in enterprise security and privacy strategies, and in the systems needed to effectively manage the IT infrastructure," he said.

Version 3.3 of OpenView Select Identity features enhanced access request workflow management, which permits administrators to designate ad hoc approvers without requiring them to assume or to already be in existing special approval roles, company officials said. The updated version also has improved self services and registrations that provide the configurable scheduling of requests and the ability for auto-discovered users to perform self service, they said.

The integration of Citrix Password Manager into OpenView Select Access 6.1 allows users to track ESSO audit log information in HP"s OpenView Select Access audit server in order to carry out end-to-end compliance. The product also has more advanced Web services access management to define and enforce more sophisticated policies by being able to examine an entire Web services request.

"In a world where many users are becoming more interested in SOAs [service oriented architectures], Web services are becoming more common and so users are demanding more and better security administration for Web services. With [Select Access 6.1], users can now define very granular policies on the Web for Web services," Allavarpu said.

Users can get more detailed information about the announcements at http://managementsoftware.hp.com.