Thor Technologies and Bridgestream Integrate Identity and Roles Management in Unique and Comprehensive Solution; Offering Enhances the Value of Identity-Management Deployments for Compliance Automation

Business Wire, July 13, 2005

NEW YORK & SAN DIEGO -- Thor Technologies, the most experienced and proven provider of identity-management solutions, and Bridgestream, Inc., a leading provider of business-roles automation solutions, today announced availability of an integrated solution combining Business Roles Automation with Enterprise Identity Management. The solution was developed as part of a strategic partnership formed by the companies to improve information security and compliance automation for large enterprises.

Thor and Bridgestream announced the integrated offering at analyst firm Burton Catalyst's annual Catalyst Conference North America event held July 13-15, 2005 in San Diego, Calif. Bridgestream is showcasing this integrated solution, consisting of Thor's Xellerate Identity Manager and Bridgestream's SmartRoles, in its hospitality suite during the event on Thursday, July 14, from 6:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m. PT.

Bridgestream and Thor formed an alliance in June 2005 when it became clear that an enterprise-wide solution for the management of business roles and role-membership management is a key enabler for enabling large enterprises to extract maximum value from their identity-management investments. In facilitating the integration, Thor leveraged Bridgestream's SmartRoles(TM) technology to automate roles management within Xellerate(R) Identity Manager. Xellerate is Thor's flagship software solution, which enables companies to control, manage and audit "Who has Access to What in the Enterprise."

Roles management defines the business relationships that exist within a department or division across the extended enterprise. This integrated offering will enable organizations to automate and enforce employees' access to information, applications and systems based on their pre-defined business roles, duties, interdependencies and relationships. For example, access rights to specific applications can be provisioned as employees work on particular projects and de-provisioned as soon as they complete the project.

"Roles management is a critical and high-value element of a complete enterprise identity management architecture," said Kevin Kampman, practice manager and senior consultant, Burton Group. "An integrated approach to identity and roles management will enable enterprises to realize the benefits of automated provisioning more quickly while reducing administration costs."

The combination of Thor's provisioning products and Bridgestream's technology has already delivered rapid and measurable return on investment for customers. Tight integration, development and support services have enabled customers to accelerate identity-management implementations for security and sustainable regulatory compliance.

"Employees' roles-- who they manage, which customers they support, which business initiatives they belong to, and which documents they see--all have associated rules and privileges," said Edward Zou, vice president of marketing for Bridgestream. "This integrated offering fulfills customers' requirements for a solution that securely manages roles and relationships and their impact on access privileges in a streamlined, low-cost manner."

Prior to this integration, enterprise IT organizations had to manually manage and define roles and privileges before they could execute identity-management initiatives to address security and regulatory issues. By eliminating this time-consuming, expensive and often inaccurate process through automation, the solution removes a significant barrier to deployment and increases time-to-value for customers embarking on identity management.

"This partnership demonstrates Thor's market-leading innovation and responsiveness to industry analysts' predictions of convergence between identity management and business-roles management," said John Aisien, vice president of marketing and business development for Thor. "The integrated solution builds on Thor's excellent track record leveraging an unparalleled partner ecosystem to create value for customers and ensure successful delivery and long-term success of identity-management deployments."

The latest version of Thor's Xellerate suite, Xellerate Identity Manager 8.5, supports integration with Bridgestream's SmartRoles. Each solution is currently available for purchase through each companies' respective sales organizations.

About Thor Technologies, Inc.

Thor Technologies provides comprehensive identity-management solutions to meet the security and compliance needs of large, complex organizations. Thor's open and standard-based Xellerate(R) software manages user-access rights and privileges throughout the provisioning lifecycle and across heterogeneous IT environments, including all platforms, systems, applications and physical assets. With unrivaled enterprise-wide provisioning capabilities, leading-edge customers, blue-chip partners and a team of seasoned domain experts, Thor delivers proven identity management solutions that reduce security risks and administrative costs, driving real and immediate business and IT benefits to the organization. Thor works with companies such as Lehman Brothers, MphasiS and Nextel Communications and counts Accenture, BearingPoint, BEA Systems and RSA Security among its strategic partners. The company can be found on the Web at www.thortech.com.