Oct, 2001 : Courion Introduces Self-Service Identity Management Suite

📅 October 17, 2001 - In an effort to allow enterprises to securely scale delivery of electronic services to employees, business partners and customers, Courion Corporation (courion.com) yesterday introduced its new Identity Management Suite, a self-service identity management product family.

Featuring new versions of PasswordCourier, Courion's flagship offering forself-service password reset and synchronization, and ProfileCourier, thecompany's self-service directory registration solution, the suite introducestwo new products - AccountCourier for self-service account provisioning,and CertificateCourier for self-service digital certificate registration.Together, the four software products manage all the key components ofdigital identity, and mark an important milestone in Courion's evolvingstrategy to offer a complete self-service infrastructure for managing userauthentication, authorization, and access.
According to META Group, users call the help desk an average of 1.75 timesper month, with 30% of those calls driven by password-related requests. Withan average cost of $20 per call, an enterprise with 20,000 employees willspend over $2.5 million a year on password administration alone. Similarhard costs for creating, disabling, and deleting user accounts, updatingemployee and business partner profiles, and registering for digitalcertificates drove Courion to expand its solution suite to include softwareproducts that help organizations realize rapid ROI in these areas as well.
Courion says its customers have realized tremendous ROI from implementingits self-service password and profile management solutions, and see a clearbenefit from a suite that will address all identity management needs."Before implementing PasswordCourier, our help desk fielded more than tenthousand calls every month from employees requesting password reset," saidChris Price, computing services director, Cummins, Inc. "Now, those userscan securely reset their own passwords, relieving a huge burden from our ITstaff. Given its track record, we believe Courion's self-service accountprovisioning and certificate registration solutions offer significantpotential savings as well."
Courion's Identity Management Suite empowers employees, business partnersand customers to reset their own forgotten or expired passwords, create anddisable user accounts, update personal profiles, and acquire digitalcertificates for corporate PKI - all without requiring information securitystaff to relinquish control. Courion's unique self-service architectureenables IT security and help desk staff to audit requests and exert completecontrol over security policies without the usual administrative burden oruser support costs. Each of the suite's software applications can beimplemented together or separately, and all share a common platform thatprovides the enterprise integration points required for secure self-service.
The two new products in the suite, AccountCourier and CertificateCourier,were developed using the same open architecture as PasswordCourier andProfileCourier, requiring no proprietary database for installation. Inaddition to seamless integration with the most common pieces ofinfrastructure such as LDAP directories or employee databases, the newproducts integrate with the market-leading service management solutions fromPeregrine Systems and PeopleSoft to allow for more efficient service levelreporting and security auditing.
"Today's global economy requires organizations to open their networks to anumber of external constituencies, making security an increasingly keyelement of enterprise IT strategy," said Tom Rose, vice president ofmarketing at Courion. "At the same time, organizations need to ensure thatusers have fast access to revenue-generating applications, while minimizingthe costs and inefficiencies of user support and administration. Courion'sIdentity Management Suite, with its unique self-service approach, addressesall of these seemingly conflicting requirements by eliminating the need tomanually provision and manage user profiles, passwords, accounts, anddigital certificates."
PasswordCourier, AccountCourier, ProfileCourier, and CertificateCourier willbe available independently or together as part of Courion's IdentityManagement Suite in Nov. 2001. Pricing for the full suite will start at $50per licensed employee for enterprise implementations. B2B and B2C pricing,volume pricing, and term (subscription) licenses will also be available.