Unify

2006 Consensus Software Awards

Product Description

As part of our strategic product development UNIFY has developed UNIFYNow which delivers Microsoft Identity Information Server 2003 (MIIS) real-time, event based provisioning capability; something that was previously unachievable through MIIS and is fundamental for Identity Management on the MIIS platform.

Through the development of the UNIFYNow event engine, UNIFY has taken the Microsoft Identity Management platform (MIIS) to the next architectural level by enabling MIIS to achieve real time provisioning. As an event engine for MIIS, it manages the events involved in a provisioning solution and triggers MIIS at appropriate event-driven points. With UNIFYNow, organisations can retain the integrity and reliability of an MIIS based solution, while gaining event driven timing that provisions identities and information when changes occur, at the time they occur (and only for the relevant changes).

UNIFYNow also enables MIIS to be a real-time, persistent platform ensuring that events are always processed and provisioned to the relevant application or service.

UNIFYNow is commercially available, has been sold to both government and financial institutions, and is copyrighted in the US.

There is no comparable product to UNIFYNow in the Microsoft tool set. We have been granted an Innovation Patent by IP Australia which we do not anticipate we will have to test.

Our capability is further endorsed by Microsoft Australia who have recognized UNIFY as the prime partner for Identity Management. Furthermore, we are currently establishing an Identity management Centre of Excellence at our Canberra head office to showcase our MIIS based Identity Management and Provisioning products and solutions.

Website: www.unifysolutions.net 

Innovation

Through the deployment of UNIFYNow, UNIFY is creating unique business advantage by extending the architecture and functional capability for Microsoft’s Identity Integration Server (MIIS) 2003 platform. This platform is predicted to form the foundation of a significant percentage of the global IdM market as it develops.

Around the world, competitors in the Identity Management and Provisioning area identify the fact that MIIS is not a real-time, event based environment as a major weakness as part of their sales campaigns and in their account holding strategies. They are right. Most large scale enterprise wide IdM deployments require real time functionality.

In the development of Microsoft based IdM solutions we quickly ran into this problem and subsequently developed UNIFYNow which has provided Microsoft with a functionally competitive solution to other vendor products including Novell, IBM and SUN.

There is significant innovation in the architecture of the product. As an event engine for MIIS, it manages the events involved in an MIIS based provisioning solution and triggers MIIS at appropriate event-driven points.

UNIFYNow allows organisations to retain the integrity and reliability of an MIIS based solution, while gaining event driven timing that provisions identities and information when changes occur, at the time they occur (and only for the relevant changes).

UNIFYNow also extends MIIS to be a real-time, persistent platform ensuring that events are always processed and provisioned to the relevant application or service.

UNIFYNow consists of two separate applications and an API. The first application is a multi-threaded engine which processes events, requests and scheduled processes relating to run profiles for MIIS 2003. The second application is a management console for the collection and management of information required by the engine.

These two applications are called the UNIFYNow Event Management Engine (UEME) and the UNIFYNow Event Management Console (UEMC) respectively. The API is called the UNIFYNow Event API (UNAPI).

Performance

UNIFY has established customer support for UNIFYNow and has completed beta testing for the product. Support for UNIFYNow is incorporated within UNIFY’s standard support infrastructure and processes.

UNIFYNow has proven itself, in a short period of time through client implementations and its ability to scale in line with Microsoft’s Identity Integration Server (MIIS) to be of Enterprise Quality and robustness. This is evident where UNIFYNow is managing real-time events across multiple applications and services within both commercial and government organisations ranging from 1000’s to 10,000’s of Identities and Objects.

UNIFYNow is coded to the highest professional standards. UNIFYNow has been developed (and continues to be) under the Microsoft framework using Microsoft development tools and services. This includes audit and quality control.

As previously noted UNIFYNow consists of two separate applications and an API.

UNIFYNow Event Management Engine (UEME) is a multi threaded service which runs alongside MIIS. It processes scheduled, polled and application triggered requests (the latter from external Management Agents). All three of these mechanisms facilitate the processing of event based data flow, into and out of the MIIS connector space, by running a predefined set of run profiles specified within MIIS. In addition to MIIS run profiles, the UEME is a fully fledged task scheduler.

UNIFYNow Event Management Console (UEMC) may be installed on a machine other than the MIIS Server, and communicates with the UEME via the UEME's SQL Server database (so the UEMC must be able to see the database). All functions work in this configuration excepting those on the Configuration tab, and the Run Now feature on operations.

UNIFYNow Event API (UNAPI) consists of functions for starting UNIFYNow Oplists from external applications. It is implemented as a COM Server, and so can be invoked from Visual Studio 6 generation languages, as well as Visual Studio .NET .

Potential

Given our stated objective is to extend the functionality of Microsoft’s Identity Information Server 2003 UNIFY believe there is significant potential world-wide to license the UNIFYNow product. UNIFY are liaising with Microsoft on their MIIS roadmap and have been advised by Microsoft that this architectural extension is not currently scheduled for inclusion in future releases.

The following is an extract from The Radicati Group in Palo Alto, California, on the overall Identity Management market potential. These figures are broadly supported by other leading market analysts including The Yankee Group, Forrester and Burton.

“Looking at the identity management market from the perspectives of full suites, provisioning, secure access/authentication, and federated identity products, The Radicati Group in its "Identity Management Market, 2004-2008" study projected that the worldwide market would grow enormously -- from $738 million in 2004 to some $10.2 billion by 2008.

Breaking down the numbers, the study showed that between 2004 and 2008, the full-suite segment would grow from about $170 million to $5.9 billion, the provisioning segment (referring to lifecycle account management) from about $459 million to some $2.5 billion, the secure access and authentication segment from about $110 million to almost $1.2 billion, and the federated identity segment (referring to secure virtual communities) from about $9 million to $685 million.

"There's a lot of interest in this area," said Masha Khmartseva, senior analyst at The Radicati Group and author of the report. "We think there's going to be a huge jump between today and 2008, because companies that are interested in these solutions will actually start to deploy them over the next four years."

UNIFYNow has recently undergone beta testing and is deploying into production in a large Australian Bank (Suncorp) and a whole of State Education Department (South Australia) as part of very complex Microsoft based IdM solutions. The first US deployment will be into the Chicago data centre of Rio Tinto which is scheduled for implementation in early March.

In addition UNIFYNow was the key component in the MIIS based Identity Management Proof of Concept for the South Australian Government which was developed and implemented by UNIFY into the Microsoft Innovation Centre in Adelaide, Australia.

Other information the judges should know

UNIFY specialises in Identity Management and Provisioning. This is an exciting and rapidly developing global market with all organisations needing to address this security area. Some major analysts in the field estimate the full IdM market is at around will peak at over $9billion globally in 2008.

It is our sole core business. We are unique within our niche for our ability to address the full gambit of IdM requirements including market analysis, business analysis, software development, project implementation and on-going support and maintenance.

UNIFY consultants have been providing IdM advice and implementing IdM solutions in the Australian marketplace since early 2000. Our clients include Federal, State and Local Government, Corporate and Education sectors organisations with current engagements in the ACT, Queensland and South Australia.

Furthermore, and of most relevance for this submission, as part of our UNIFYConnect suite of IdM products, UNIFY’s Development team has more recently developed products which provide business solutions and which are commercially available on multiple vendor based IdM platforms - predominantly Microsoft’s MIIS 2003 and Novell’s NIM2 IdM Platforms. These platforms are common in organisations around the world.

UNIFY has also developed UNIFYNow which gives Microsoft’s MIIS platform real-time, event based provisioning capability.

We have announced and are currently establishing Australia’s first Identity management Centre of Excellence in Canberra to showcase MIIS based Identity Management and Provisioning.

UNIFY has and is being engaged not only for the design and implementation of IdM projects for our clients, but to also provide advice and consultancy services to our vendor partners. This includes presentations, demonstrations and keynote speeches at Identity Management and Provisioning conferences and seminars.

We have and continue to provide presentation and consultancy services on behalf of Microsoft Australia in regards to MIIS and the business aspects of Identity Management. This includes client presentations, CIO workshops and national road shows.

Our capability is further endorsed by Microsoft Australia who have recognised UNIFY as their prime partner for Identity Management.

Other UNIFY Developed Products for MIIS

UNIFY has and continues to develop products based upon MIIS for which we have registered Intellectual Property ownership and make commercially available to the marketplace. These include:

UNIFYConnect

UNIFYMatch

UNIFYNow

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UNIFY has and continues to develop products based upon MIIS for which we have registered Intellectual Property ownership and make commercially available to the marketplace. These include:

Is a core component of UNIFY's suite of UNIFYConnect based Management Agents and Connectors. When used in a development environment, UNIFYConnect allows for the rapid development of custom Management Agents without compromising functionality, stability or integrity of the Agent or the solution. UNIFYConnect allows for extended Management Agent capability and functionality.

UNIFYConnect extends the traditional capabilities of MIIS Management Agents by interacting with the disparate application or service at a business level and providing further capabilities such as role based information, organizational structure, manager relationships and self checking to ensure that data integrity is never compromised – all real-time with changes being provisioned at the time of change.

UNIFYConnect has been used as the base for the following commercially available MIIS Management Agents developed and provided by UNIFY:

• Microsoft’s SharePoint Server

• Microsoft’s Authorization Manager (AZMAN)

• Frontier software’s CHRIS HR and Payroll (versions 5 and 21)

• Aurion Corporation’s AURION HR and Payroll

• Tower Software’s TRIM Document Management and Workflow

UNIFYConnect and the suite of UNIFYConnect based MA’s are commercially available.

UNIFYMatch is a powerful business tool which uses MIIS as the basis of an efficient and intelligent real time data cleansing, matching, and merging process that can unlock the value of diversely stored data.

UNIFYMatch is an application that becomes part of the Identity Management solution and allows for intelligent automated and user-assisted matching of identities across multiple applications and directories. This is a crucial ability where simple automated matching is not possible due to poor data integrity across the applications, the lack of a common key or where an organization wishes to present a common view of information in disparate applications without having to provision attributes between them.