The privately held company, which is headquartered in Edinburgh, Scotland, said the core elements of the solution are the IDM infrastructure suite from BMC, provisioning agents for each of the apps, the workflow tool across the front end, and DNS’s 24-hour support services.
The workflow technology, which is the result of BMC’s acquisition of Calendra, is the area where Richard Lewis, the company’s sales and marketing manager, said he sees the most obvious differentiation for BMC compared to its competitors. The workflow front-end really sets BMC apart, said Lewis.
The core offering is priced based on two factors: the number of users, and the number of applications to which customers want to enable access. Lewis said the minimum number of users at which it makes sense to take the service is probably about 1,000, though equally, a company with 500 might want to use it for access to 40 apps, for instance, he said. While declining to give specific prices for a sample implementation, he said on a three-to-five-year contract, total cost of ownership generally works out about 25% lower than for a system managed in-house.
He said beyond the core service, there are optional extras enabled by the BMC platform. These are: Enterprise Directory, which offers synchronization of LDAP-compliant directories to the BMC IDM infrastructure, enabling a move to a single, common directory across the company; Entry Lifecycle Management, which synchronizes the IDM service with a company’s HR systems for handling employees’ entry into and exit from payroll; Role-Based Access Control, taking IT access privileges and associating them to a job role; White Pages offering integration with a company phone directory; Self-Service Password Management; and Custom Enhancements.
Lewis said the geographies chosen for the initial phase of the roll-out of the service are related to its English language focus. He said markets such as Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa would be natural extensions.
Lewis said the managed IDM service is unique in the BMC world, and to date the company’s competitors have tended to go a different route. Companies like IBM have been developing quick implementation capabilities by developing a replicable model, which we also do, but with the additional cost advantages of a managed service, he said.
