Monday, 30 June 2008

CA Launches 2 New Initiatives

CA, Inc. today announced two initiatives to address federation market dynamics and technology evolution.

Firstly, the software company is kicking off the beta test program for CA Federation Manager, a new product designed to ease the deployment of federated partnerships. This product is set to address the market evolution for more rapid and simpler federation deployments as the number of federated partnerships for a typical organization moves from dozens of partners to hundreds.

“We are seeing continued maturity in the federation market and are developing CA Federation Manager to address the way the federation market is moving,” said Bilhar Mann, senior vice president, CA Security Management.

“In the past federation was typically viewed as an extension to a Web access management system.
Parallel to this announcement, CA also unveiled support for Microsoft Windows CardSpace in the next release of CA SiteMinder Web Access Manager.

In this release, CA says it intends to provide an Information Card Authentication Scheme within CA SiteMinder Web Access Manager that enables it to manage access to Web sites that accept self-issued or managed cards for access. Once the user is authenticated by CA SiteMinder, access can be controlled for that site using standard CA SiteMinder policy functionality.

“Many of our existing customers use CA SiteMinder Web Access Manager to protect large-scale consumer facing Web sites. As Windows CardSpace becomes more popular in the market with users and organizations, this support should allow CA SiteMinder customers to accept CardSpace compliant information cards—either managed or self-issued—to enable access to their Web applications and ease the user’s access while giving them more control and privacy,” Mann said.