Netegrity Releases IdentityMinder

Deepak Taneja, Netegrity's CTO, said the product addresses four key business issues: delegated user administration so business units or partners can manage their own users, user self-service for password management and other services, integrated workflow, and integration between identity management and access management.

Integrated workflow is essential, Taneja said. "What IT wants in this day and age is for user accounts to be managed and assigned based on business processes that they already have in their environment," he said.

Identity Minder integrates with Netegrity's SiteMinder Web access management product.

With IdentityMinder, Netegrity aims to allow enterprises to manage users and their changing roles in a company, said Kurt Gilman, partner in PricewaterhouseCoopers' Global Risk Management Solutions practice.

Right now, user management is a disjointed process, he said. For example, while human resources will know about a new hire, it won't know what specific rights that person should have in a particular application, such as procurement, so someone else has to approve the new employee's rights to the application, Gilman said.

"What these identity systems are able to do is not only trigger the fact that someone has been hired, but also route and start building their rights based on workflow and aggregate entitlements as they span their career and change jobs," he said.

That information is put into a directory so an enterprise can leverage the data, Gilman added.

IdentityMinder works with an LDAP repository, Taneja said.

Gilman said vendors currently target their identity management solutions at large enterprises, but midsize companies also need the technology.

"There's no reason why you wouldn't want to implement this at a smaller company," he said.

Netegrity initially unveiled IdentityMinder in the summer and said the product was scheduled for availability in October. The vendor said Monday that the product is slated for availability in two weeks.

For current SiteMinder customers, IdentityMinder is priced on a per-user basis and ranges from less than $1 to about $11 per user. The more users, the less it costs per user. For those without SiteMinder, IdentityMinder, which includes SiteMinder, starts at about $40 per user and reduces down to about $1 per user.