CA World: CA begins Netegrity integration

IDG News Service - By year's end, Computer Associates International Inc. expects to release its first product to integrate software the company acquired in its November 2004 purchase of identity management software vendor Netegrity. The product, called CA Identity Manager, was announced at the CA World 2005 conference in Las Vegas today.

Identity Manager will fuse the Netegrity's IdentityMinder software with CA's eTrust Admin provisioning product, giving users one product to manage user account information for a wider variety of applications, said Matthew Gardiner, director of identity and access management marketing at CA. CA's software was specialized in working with enterprise and mainframe applications, whereas the IdentityMinder software was known for its Web application capabilities, he said. The new product will also include auditing and reporting tools to make it easier for companies to comply with government regulations like the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

Toby Weiss, senior vice president and general manager of CA's security management unit, said CA Identity Manager primarily unifies identity management chores across a company -- from mainframes to the Web.

Beta-tester Kevin Murphy, senior information security analyst at The Reynolds and Reynolds Co., said the primary benefit of the new product will be the ability to quickly provision security management, including new policies and permissions. Murphy said he uses an earlier version of the product purchased from Netegrity that had no provisioning capabilities.

Those earlier versions had already reduced the need for the company's help desk to provide password look-ups, which account for about 40% of help desk calls, he said. Reynolds and Reynolds provides IT systems and support to more than 4,000 car dealerships, with more than 38,000 customer accounts, Murphy said.

CA spent more than $400 million on the Netegrity acquisition. That move was intended to strengthen the company's position in the authentication and access-control market by combining Netegrity's products with its eTrust identity and access management product line.
Customers and analysts had expressed concerns about whether the acquisition would produce useful and well-supported products, and over the next year they should get a clearer idea of CA's intentions. In 2006, the Islandia, N.Y.-based software vendor expects to begin integrating Netegrity's two other major products into its portfolio.

Early next year, CA will integrate Netegrity SiteMinder with its eTrust SSO (Single Sign On) software. Later in the year, a Web services management product called TransactionMinder will be integrated with CA's Web Services Distributed Management product, Gardiner said.

Identity Manager's pricing will range from about $1 per user to $80 per user, depending on the number involved. The product willship "within the next 45 days," Gardiner said.

Computerworld's Matt Hamblen contributed to this report.