Privately held Imprivata, from Lexington, Massachusetts, had its first full year in operation with its OneSign ESSO product in 2005 and says it has some 160 customers on board. The appliance already has authentication technology for the purposes of SSO, said CEO Omar Hussain, but until now he said most of the mechanisms for transporting trusted identity, whether tokens, smart cards, USB tokens or proximity cards, required the customer to run the technology provider’s dedicated management server to run along with the Imprivata appliance.
The VacMan Controller from Oakbrook Terrace, Illinois-based Vasco Data Security International Inc has now been integrated with the OneSign firmware. Wayne Parslow, VP of Imprivata’s EMEA operations, said: This means that if a customer is running our appliance for ESSO and someone else’s authentication server and tokens, they can simply upgrade the software on our box to the latest version and swap out to the cheaper Vasco tokens, which the OneSign appliance will then be able to manage.
Equally, if a company wants to implant strong authentication but not necessarily go all the way to ESSO for access to specific apps, Imprivata is also launching the authentication module, with VacMan Controller embedded, as a separate product, again shipping on the appliance. In addition to opening up a broader market beyond the regulated industries such as financial services and healthcare where ESSO is a major requirement, Hussain said this should also give the company sell-up opportunities to ESSO once the appliance is already on a customer’s premises.
In pricing terms, the One Sign Enterprise Network Authentication version of the appliance and Vasco tokens to support 1,000 users costs around $70 per user, which Hussain said is about 2x-times cheaper than the leading competitor.
