RSA, Thor hammer out provisioning alliance

RSA Security said that it has formed a strategic alliance with enterprise provisioning company Thor Technologies to add Thor’s user provisioning technology to RSA’s ClearTrust Web access management product.

The alliance, which the two companies announced on Wednesday, will bundle Thor’s Xellerate secure enterprise provisioning software with ClearTrust.

Xellerate is an enterprise provisioning product that streamlines the creation, management and revocation of access rights for user accounts. Xellerate’s workflow and user self-service features will be built into the ClearTrust product, according to Tim Powers, a spokesman for RSA.

The workflow features allow administrators to streamline time-consuming tasks such as adding, revoking, or modifying user access to applications and network resources.

Self-service features such as account-creation profile management reduce the burden on IT staff of common requests such as password updates, according to Powers.

However, customers who want to take advantage of Xellerate’s full feature set will have to purchase the product separately from Thor, Powers said.

Prior to the alliance, Thor was a member of RSA’s Secured Partner program and Xellerate was certified to work with both the RSA ClearTrust identity management product and RSA SecureID two-factor authentication technology, according to RSA.

That close relationship made Thor a natural choice when RSA went looking to add provisioning features to ClearTrust, Powers said.

In addition to the merged products, the new alliance will involve joint sales and marketing activities and the sharing of technical and architectural road maps for the two products, RSA said.

The announcement with RSA is just the latest move by Thor to make inroads with major identity management vendors. In April, Thor announced that a similar integration with Sun Microsystems, adding Xellerate’s provisioning features to the Sun ONE (Open Net Environment) identity management platform.

In addition to Thor’s earlier announcement with Sun, recent months have brought a string of product announcements and partnerships between identity management and provisioning vendors.

On Friday, Netegrity announced a new version of its IdentityMinder product featuring closer integration of identity and access management with user provisioning capabilities such as password synchronization and role-based provisioning.

IBM’s Tivoli Systems said it would also be releasing a new version of Tivoli Identity Manager in the near future that will include APIs for closer integration with third-party products.

Integrated ClearTrust and Xellerate software will be available in the third quarter of 2003 from RSA and its authorized channel partners, according to RSA.

Existing ClearTrust customers with full maintenance agreements and new customers purchasing ClearTrust will receive the Xellerate software at no additional cost, Powers said.