Lexington, Massachusetts-based Imprivata delivers its ESSO technology as an appliance called OneSign, which is currently at version 2.5, with v2.8 the next major release as the intervening numbers have been for patches, said Omar Hussain, its senior VP of marketing and product management.
Where v2.5 supports tokens from RSA and Secure Computing as well as fingerprint biometrics, next month’s launch of v2.8 will see support extended to smart cards from the likes of Gemplus and Schlumberger and common access technologies based on RFID. It will also add tokens from Vasco and add more chipsets and readers for fingerprint biometrics, said Hussain.
Beyond that, he said customers are beginning to ask Imprivata to deliver both ESSO and strong authentication in a single box, to which end it is considering OEM relationships. Hussain said the two technologies it is looking at are smart cards and USB tokens. While Gemplus and Schlumberger are the likely suspects for a deal on the former, the latter technology is offered by companies such as Aladdin and Rainbow.
Imprivata charges for OneSign by chunks of users, with sales in the hundreds of users averaging about $50 a head, in the low thousands $20. It targets companies with anywhere between 100 and 10,000 users, but it sees its sweet spot as the 500-7,000 range.
Hussain said the recent acquisitions of SSO vendors Netegrity by CA and Oblix by Oracle don’t really impact Imprivata’s market because they are WebSSO, not ESSO whereas its direct competitors tend to come from strong authentication, such as RSA, with the PassLogic technology it OEMs, and ActiveCard, after its Trinity acquisition. We’re currently the only ESSO vendor delivering its technology as an appliance, he said.
