CA Upgrades eTrust Product

In a move sure to shake up the identity management marketplace, Computer Associates International Monday unveiled a revolutionary upgrade to its eTrust Identity and Access Management suite.

The upgrade—version 8—is comprised of four modular components, making it flexible enough to serve customers with a variety of identity and access management, or IAM, needs. The modules handle role-based identity provisioning, role-based access privileges, password administration and resource management.

CA, Islandia, N.Y., unveiled the new version at the RSA Conference in San Francisco. According to Bilhar Mann, vice president for eTrust IAM, the upgrade was designed to offer a different identity-driven solution for every enterprise.

"Today networks are heterogeneous in nature, and you need an identity management system that will take that into account," Mann said. "We feel that our product does exactly that."

Specifically, the upgrade integrates technology CA gained when it acquired Netegrity for $430 million in October 2004. With its modular approach, the upgraded version also blazes a new, customizable path for identity management applications, which previously only offered a blanket, one-size-fits-all kind of approach.

As Mann explained, the modules are tightly integrated with each other so that roles created in one component are applied throughout all of the others. All administration tasks can be executed from a single Web interface. What's more, customers also can create common workflows that link access authorizations with password assignments.

Down the road, Mann added, CA will integrate these products with the Unicenter Web Services management product, dubbed WSDM. This broader integration will allow for all kinds of data sharing, from the identity management system to the network manager and back again.

Solution providers were delighted to hear that CA finally was making good on the technology it obtained through its Netegrity purchase.

"The fact that CA is assembling and improving upon a true suite of identity management products is great," said Elizabeth Mann, managing director of MyCroft, New York, who said she was looking forward to the eTrust Single Sign-On 8.0 but noted that for some of her customers other modules might be more appealing.

"The best part [of this product new suite] is that it's not an all-or-nothing type of process," she said.

The eTrust IAM Suite was expected to be available at the end of February. Pricing was not available.