With the rising usage of identity and Web-based services in
the last few years, Sun Microsystems is reinventing its identity management
business to efficiently protect user administration, authorization, and
authentication.

"The new thrust on IM is because the network is ushering in
a new era of business growth and opportunity. People are using network
communications to interact and collaborate in ways that were impossible a few
years ago. These new capabilities have quickly created new expectations for
today's enterprise," said Manish Malhotra, director (software) of Sun
Microsystems India. 

According to Malhotra, a company must have an identity and
access management (IAM) infrastructure in place to ensure that people have
access to all the resources they need, and to prove in audits that access is
being managed correctly and in compliance with internal security policies and external
regulations.

Malhotra said the effort involved in the management of
digital identities of users has grown significantly and is putting huge
pressure on over-stretched IT departments. Add to this, the growing incidence
of identity fraud and the associated damage to corporate reputations, it is
time this area of IT management is given serious attention.

And how does IM fit into Sun s existing businesses? Malhotra
said, "Sun views the identity management suite of products as an integrated,
flexible platform that provides critical layer of infrastructure security
services to enable enterprises, service providers and consumers to conduct
business anytime, anywhere and via any device."

He said while the suite is part of Sun's Software
Infrastructure (SWI) product portfolio, which comprises Java and middleware
software infrastructure products, it is also used in deployments of desktop and
datacenter software products such as thin clients, virtualization and cloud
computing. These are core business areas where Sun's product and services
offerings are focused, enabling customers to improve participation beyond the
boundaries of their enterprise, accelerate the delivery of new services, reduce
IT complexity and maximize business value.

Sun always had IM as a part of its Iplanet product series.
But there were no major efforts made to extract the value from its services. "Purely
from a functional perspective, the product was designed from a large enterprise
perspective, installation requiring some efforts. They plan to compete with the
products in high-end environments wherein auditing and compliance is key," said
Madan Mohan, partner, Browne and Mohan. 



But with IBM, HP and others already offering not just IM, but the bundle of
asset management, configuration management and help-desk, Sun would continue to play the complementary strategy of software, which it has always played,
said Mohan.

There is also likelihood that the company would offer the
product at a deep discount to push its server sales, according to sources. Sun,
however, did not disclose the pricing strategy.