Since the days of Electronic Data Interchange, modest-sized suppliers dealing with major hub customers like GM or Wal-Mart have often been whipsawed into complying with their partner’s electronic commerce requirements.
IBM’s new Tivoli Federated Identity Manager Business Gateway, sits on a Windows, Linux, or UNIX server, providing a way to remember all the login information that suppliers are required to provide when logging onto their trading partner sites for routine transactions and queries like shipping schedules, delivery requirements, order backlogs, or invoicing.
The product was adapted from the existing Tivoli Federated Identification Manager by eliminating features that are unnecessary for smaller firms, like the ability to manage multiple replications across distributed sites. The new SMB product assumes that the customer probably is working from a single office and is replicating sign-on data on at most one or a handful of servers.
The product would, in effect, bolt onto either IBM WebSphere’s Apache or Microsoft’s IIS web servers, and could either act as a standalone single sign in portal, or be embedded into a portal or web commerce application as the single sign on component. It uses security tokens that are submitted to the external partner trading hubs via a SAML-based web service.
In effect, the software automates the establishing of session IDs or management of cookies that are used for automating the login to external sites. Actual session management remains on the external trading hub site.
The product was slimmed down to fit on a single installation CD suited for installation in small offices. Priced at $50,000 to $70,000 per server, the product might be simple enough for SMBs to install, but not necessarily affordable.
IBM Tivoli Federated Identity Manager Business Gateway is available now.
