The IBM Tivoli division has teamed up with Deloitte & Touche to deliver a package of software and services to get companies up and running quickly and for a fixed cost with network identity management.

The ID Accelerator offering, announced Monday, packages Tivoli's Identity Manager software with services from Deloitte & Touche's Security Services group to help large and mid-size businesses automate the task of managing user identities and enforcing security policies.

The Tivoli Identity Managers product, acquired by IBM from Access360 in October, is a provisioning product that links into human resource and other resources in the enterprise, in order to manage accounts and privileges for users across a variety of systems.

"It allows you to maintain privileges of all user at all times, so that for instance if a person leaves, you can revoke their privileges, or if they get promoted, you can add to their privileges," says Jeff Curie, program director of the IBM Tivoli Security Market Management in Irvine, Texas.

The relationship with Deloitte followed from that company's security audit business, which often finds active accounts for people who have left the company.

ID Accelerator is providing a return on investment that has been elusive for security software and services suppliers to define, says Mark Ford, partner of Deloitte & Touche in the central U.S. Security area in Detroit.

"The service translates into real dollar savings," especially by automating manual user provisioning, he says. "We have never had a good ROI story for our customers in the past. It's always been about fear, uncertainty and doubt. But now we are optimizing environments to bring a real ROI message to the marketplace."

Final pricing for the ID Accelerator package had not been established as of last week. IBM prices Identity Managers from $30 to $50 per user, or on a per CPU basis, which for companies with 20,000 employees that fit the IBM customer target translates to a price of $600,000.

"That's fairly average," Curie said. The ID Accelerator bundle aims to speed implementation and fix the price of the service to get the software installed and running. "It is fairly invasive to the infrastructure to set up," Ford says.