| Imanami makes identity management easy with
suite of powerful point products
Cingular Wireless Taps Imanami for Simple, Seamless Employee Communications Strategy
During Merger & Acquisition Activity
Livermore, Calif., May 23, 2005
Imanami today announced a suite of five powerful point products that simplify, automate and streamline the process for building and maintaining identity management (IdM) systems. Ideal for organizations looking to leverage existing investments in Microsoft Active Directory and Exchange, Imanami simplifies and dramatically increases the success of an IdM project rollout.
"In today's competitive and highly regulated work environment, organizations of all sizes are looking to implement or improve identity management systems with initiatives ranging from centralized meta-directories, to automating their current 'sneaker-net' processes," said Robert Haaverson, Imanami president and CEO. "While federated identity and single sign-on are avidly discussed and hold great promise, getting the enterprise to effectively communicate within itself is a far more manageable and attainable goal - and it can ultimately determine the success or failure of the more adventurous IdM initiatives."
According to a recent report from the Radicati Group, the identity management market will rocket up to $10.2 billion by 2008. Increased regulatory compliance and business efficiency are driving most IdM initiatives today, with increased security, improved internal efficiencies, and improved internal communications as a natural by-product. Currently, companies follow an arduous process for implementing an IdM rollout that typically takes months to accomplish, involves multiple internal meetings, outside consultant fees and additional hardware requirements. Typically, 80 percent of the process is politics and business, and 20 percent is focused on the technology.
Most implementations try to make the leap to IdM in one single bound, as opposed to breaking it down into easy-to-accomplish steps. Projects get caught up in internal politics and laborious planning sessions since most solutions demand that all of the requirements, from every business unit be defined - before implementing any technology. Therefore, many IdM implementations, especially those involving meta-directories, run the risk of showing no ROI or any benefit until they are 100 percent deployed, which on average happens 12-18 months later.
Imanami point products break down IdM into manageable steps that can provide the quick wins, meaningful ROI and increased end-user satisfaction that helps ensure internal company support for a complete IdM rollout. For example, Cingular Wireless has implemented several Imanami products enterprise-wide and then relied on Imanami to make the impact of the AT&T Wireless acquisition as seamless as possible with regard to employee communications, garnering support and recognition for the IT department and Cingular's top management.
"The IT department was asked to create 34 temporary distribution lists within 24 hours of the acquisition to allow managers and staff to begin communicating within their new teams immediately," said Timothy Jensen, messaging architect for Cingular Wireless. "This alone could have had a huge impact on our workload. With Imanami, what would have taken days took a matter of five hours and we were able to focus our IT resources on more strategic initiatives."
Imanami's product suite is comprised of five point solutions that provide directory synchronization, self-service directory management, dynamic group management, Microsoft Outlook profile management and flexible directory reporting:
Imanami Directory Transformation Manager (DTM):
DTM synchronizes multiple directories and databases, provides bi-directional
communication between directories and can transform data on the
fly. It will even handle provisioning and de-provisioning within
Active Directory.
Imanami WebDir: WebDir is a powerful web-based
directory management solution that provides self-service to users
to update their own directory information, search the global catalog,
modify objects in different domains and manage their own groups.
Imanami SmartR: SmartR is a simple reporting tool that allows administrators
to view or print accurate reports right out of the box on objects
within the directory or global address list.
Imanami SmartDL: SmartDL increases the accuracy
of distribution lists and security groups while reducing the IT
department's workload with a wizard-based automated distribution
list and group management solution.
Imanami OProfile: OProfile automatically configures
Outlook to allow end-users to move from computer to computer and
have their email work without any intervention by IT staff.
Imanami customers can connect Microsoft directories with leading human resources platforms such as PeopleSoft, database applications like Oracle, and mail systems like Lotus Notes or SunOne. "We had all the critical information in our human resources database, but it was too hard to extract from PeopleSoft and the data was unreliable," said Douglas Kremer, director of employee communications for Cingular.
"Using Imanami DTM we were able to synchronize our internal data sources without deploying a meta-directory," said Jensen. "It is so easy to use and doesn't require any additional hardware or pricey professional services. We will definitely rely on Imanami DTM to synchronize the Cingular and AT&T Wireless directories across the enterprise."
By enabling IT departments to synchronize directories and automate both distribution lists and Outlook profiles, Imanami automates the typically manual and time-consuming process of maintaining user directories. By empowering users to maintain their own directory attributes and groups with restrictions set by the administrator, IT departments can again save time and resources typically spent updating directories manually.
"By unifying human resources and IT operations - instead of having some information managed from individual business units and others managed at the corporate level - we were able to better target employee groups and improve the use of employee information," said Kremer. "With Imanami's products, we were able to meet our goal of improving employee communications while achieving significant cost savings -- a definite challenge given our complex and changing operations."
Unlike most current IdM solutions, Imanami's solutions are light on the enterprise and do not require extra hardware, additional databases or specially trained administrators. In most cases, Imanami customers can demonstrate a visible return on investment in less than 30 days. Architected to be easy-to-use, most Imanami products are deployed in hours, rather than weeks or even months, and usually require simple documentation or phone support to complete.
All of Imanami's products are available now. Product pricing is user-based and ranges from $5,000 - $200,000, depending on size of organization
About Imanami
Imanami provides simple yet powerful point solutions for identity
management that automate and streamline the process of maintaining
user directories. A Microsoft Gold Partner, Imanami has nearly 400
customers from every industry, including: Cingular Wireless, Mentor
Graphics, Panasonic, Rubbermaid, SAIC and the U.S. Department of
Energy. More information can be found at www.imanami.com
Press contact:
Edward Killeen
Imanami Corporation
925-273-2914
edward.killeen@imanami.com
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