The new Xellerate Identity Manager 8.5 product also has added features it says will improve exception-handling processes and the management of compliance initiatives through graphical workflows.
Last year, Thor split its provisioning software out into three separate products and renamed it Xellerate Identity Manager 8.0, and two subsets of functionality dealing with auditing and compliance and password management that have been broken out into separate products.
Thor is one of the few independents left standing in the user provisioning and ID management sector. IBM acquired Access 360, Netegrity paid about $50m for Business Layers and was itself the target of a takeover by Computer Associates, Sun Microsystems took out Waveset, and Oblix finally fell to Oracle.
Provisioning software automates the process of granting, changing and revoking user access to enterprise applications, messaging systems, databases, and other corporate resources. The systems provide remote access for delegated administration (individual, rules-based, or role-based) and self-serve functions, will offer some supporting workflow and auditing features, and use remote and/or locally based agents or connectors and, usually, some form of repository.
Organizations of all sizes hold a huge range of employee information in a variety of different data repositories: the human resources database, the email server directory, the SAP accounts system, and so on. Larger organizations may typically have a few hundred mini-directories and data repositories scattered around the enterprise, with email, network operating systems and applications all housing user information. They rely on administrators to add, modify, and delete user records across these multiple systems. This is both costly and inefficient.
