Thor Technologies Launches Identity Management Upgrade; Xellerate® Identity Manager 8.5 Addresses Critical Deployment Challenges Associated with Large-Scale Enterprise Implementations

Business Wire, July 13, 2005

NEW YORK & SAN DIEGO -- Thor Technologies, the most experienced and proven provider of identity management solutions, today announced the launch of Xellerate(R) Identity Manager 8.5, the latest version of the company's flagship software suite for identity-management across the enterprise. This new version builds on Thor's track record of innovation and success in meeting the identity-management requirements of the most complex organizations.

Thor announced the availability of Xellerate Identity Manager 8.5 at Burton Group's annual Catalyst Conference North America, held from July 13-15, 2005 in San Diego, Calif.

Global 2000 organizations and public sector agencies are increasingly turning to Thor to prevent information security breaches and meet stringent

regulatory requirements specifying tighter controls over user access to information, applications and systems. Because an enterprise-wide identity management deployment can impact thousands of applications and hundreds of thousands of user accounts, implementations can be complex and resource consuming.

The new features available in Xellerate Identity Manager 8.5 ease the implementation process, streamline implementation from production to deployment through a Web-based deployment management tool, bolster exception-handling processes and provide cost-effective evidence of compliance through graphical workflows.

"When evaluating identity-management solutions, Thor's Xellerate Identity Manager 8.5 provided a broad feature set that provides The Principal a low total ownership cost and an accelerated path to return on investment - two of the key criteria we used in conducting our search for a business-driven technology solution," said Brian Robbins, senior IT analyst, Principal Financial Group. "Xellerate helped us solve the myriad challenges involved in the successful deployment of what has become an enterprise-wide and highly strategic initiative for our company that will ultimately benefit our customers and shareholders."

The key advancements pioneered in 8.5 represent input and requirements from Thor's customer base of Global 2000 organizations, spanning industries from financial services, manufacturing, automotive to professional services. The new features were built in response to direct experiences, customer and partner feedback over the course of highly successful, enterprise-wide deployments.

In addition to numerous incremental functionality, architectural enhancements and platform-support upgrades, 8.5 delivers the following significant new features to enable successful solution delivery across the enterprise:

--  Deployment Manager: Building on powerful deployment-management
        tools available in earlier releases, Xellerate Identity
        Manager 8.5 provides a robust, full-featured and Web-based
        Deployment Manager. Deployment Manager enables intuitive
        change management of high-value system metadata, promoting
        migration of configured rules, policies, workflows, resource
        adapters and other information from development to quality
        assurance and finally to production environments. This
        capability is critical to ensuring that change control is
        correctly and cost-effectively enforced. In addition,
        post-development rollouts can proceed rapidly with minimal
        additional quality assurance checks for changes to resource
        definitions, approval and provisioning workflows and business
        rules.

        The new version of the Deployment Manager has also been
        enhanced to support collaborative development environments.
        Based on a deep understanding of the development environments
        preferred by the largest companies in the world, the
        Deployment Manager has been enhanced to support multiple users
        combining efforts to work on workflows, rules, policies,
        adapters, and all of the other elements that eventually get
        aggregated and deployed together. This type of support
        empowers Thor's clients to leverage SMEs within the
        organization and meet aggressive time-to-delivery targets
        without compromising security or functionality.

    --  Graphical Workflow: In response to client demand, version 8.5
        delivers the ability to render approval and provisioning
        workflows in an intuitive graphical interface. This capability
        allows workflow developers to quickly ascertain whether they
        have modeled provisioning and user-approval processes
        correctly, especially when evaluating against exception case
        flows. Critically, it also provides for rapid executive and
        auditor insight into the handling of exceptions, rejection
        workflows and other non-standard behaviors. It is a valuable
        tool for documenting the processes being established in the
        system, by inclusion in design documents and archival into
        source control systems. It provides an easy way to transfer
        knowledge between teams over the lifetime of the project.
        Lastly, it serves as auditable, documentary evidence of
        critical elements of overall security policy, enabling &
        reducing the cost of ongoing compliance. Unlike other
        solutions on the market, which offer elementary workflow
        capabilities that display the "best-case" scenario in a
        rudimentary fashion, Xellerate provides real-world value
        through rich visual information based on UI standards.