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CA Technologies is evolving its identity management portfolio to include new cloud-based applications that will make the provisioning and management of user accounts in the cloud and on-premise easier and more efficient. Eventually, the plan is to make identity management-as-a-service available to managed service providers.

At CA World in Las Vegas, CA unveiled the new products — CA IdentityMinder as-a-Service and CA FedMinder as-a-Service. Both products build on the portfolio of identity management software products that CA has developed or accumulated over the last decade.

IdentityMinder is designed to complement the existing CA AuthMinder service offering, giving enterprise the ability to extend self-service identity management to end users, provisioning and management of account IDs to on-premise and cloud-based resources, automated workflows for approving access requests and, of course, auditing and reporting capabilities.

FedMinder extends identity management to disparate cloud resources, providing enterprises with single sign-on capabilities across multiple domains, federation of identities across partner web sites and domains, and access rights management based on identity profiles.

As part of its general transformation to become a cloud enablement and management vendor, CA has placed particular emphasis on identity management as a core strategy component. It acquired Arcot for authentication capabilities and has been managing and tracking identities and accounts in the cloud. The addition of IdentityMinder and FedMinder to its general CloudMinder portfolio creates an integrated identity, access control and authentication suite that spans both sides of the corporate firewall.

Today, CA is the provider of these identity management services, but that will evolve to extending the same capabilities to manage service providers, says Mike Denning, general manager of CA’s Security Business Unit. The services offered today will give CA the experience to develop robust and scalable offerings that can be delivered through managed services providers.

CA sees an opportunity in the identity management market, given the consolidation and disruption in this segment. According to CA, Oracle isn’t pursuing opportunities with the Sun Microsystems IDM products it acquired, although it does have IDM solutions of its own. Questions remain what Attachmate will do with the IDM products it acquired through Novell. That leaves IBM, Hitachi and CA as the major IDM players. Additionally, CA is now an authentication player in another sparsely populated segment. Since Symantec bought VeriSigns’ certificates business, the market has coalesced around RSA, Symantec and CA.

With the expanded CloudMinder portfolio, CA believes it can capture new market share. Where things will get interesting is when these services enter the managed services segment. IDM is mostly an enterprise product only suitable for organizations with 5,000 or more seats. By making it a service that MSPs can deliver, CA may shatter the IDM barrier by making the robust service practical and affordable for midmarket organizations.

Denning says the short-term goal for the CloudMinder portfolio of services is gaining experience. In time, that experience will translate into services for delivery and management by the channel. When that happens, the identity management game could change dramatically.

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