Hewlett-Packard Co. this week announced an identity management product, HP OpenView Select Identity, which is designed to automate a full range of identity and access control tasks.
HP OpenView Select Identity, which emerged from HP’s purchase of TruLogica Inc. in March, will be integrated with HP OpenView Select Access, which itself evolved from the purchase of Baltimore Technologies Inc. in 2003, according to Andrew Flint, product manager for Select Access.
Adding identity management to HP Service Desk software could allow end users to reset passwords on their own, bypassing a service desk call at a savings of US$15 to US$30 per call, said Christopher Pfister, director of IT service and security management for HP. “HP is now offering a complete password management solution,” he said.
The University of Colorado at Boulder purchased Select Access from HP in February and has a rollout scheduled for completion in October, according to Jon Giltner, director of IT analysis architecture and security at the university. The new Select Identity product, and others like it in the market, are being reviewed by the university, he said.
Giltner said Select Access has clear benefits for 200 departments at the school, but Select Identity would be a lower priority since it would improve only how efficiently the IT staff operates.
Select Access helps centralize authentication and authorization tasks across the university, he said. Before the project began, IT staffers in each department might develop a Web application that asked for a student’s private data and then stored that data in the department’s server — where security would be as robust as a central location, Giltner said.
Select Access was easy to add to the university’s 12-year-old central authentication application. By using the Select Access process atop the older application, user data is kept safer and the process for authentication is more efficient, he said.
“HP’s been good to work with so far, and the technology seems to work,” he said.
The release of both Select Identity and Select Access shows HP is trying to offer a well-rounded security management capability that competes with products from other major companies such as IBM Tivoli, Computer Associates International Inc. and BMC Software Inc., said Pete Lindstrom, an analyst at Spire Security LLC in Malvern, Pa.
Of the big players, Tivoli leads in identity management. But there are many smaller companies that are also important, such as RSA Security Inc. in Bedford, Mass., Entrust Inc. in Dallas, and Netegrity Inc. in Waltham, Mass., Lindstrom said.
Select Access starts at US$21 per user for 1,000 users, and drops in price as the number of users increases. Select Identity starts at US$75 per user for 1,000 users. Both are available now.
