Thor Technologies Inc and Sun Microsystems have announced that Thor's Xellerate secure enterprise provisioning system has been extended to the Sun Open Net Environment (Sun ONE) Identity Server platform.

"An integrated identity and access management system for the enterprise can result in tremendous cost savings and improved efficiency for IT administrators," says Fred Federlein, marketing development manager for Sun. The Sun ONE Directory Server and the Sun ONE Identity Server to provide a single point of administration for users to grant, manage and revoke user access to applications.

"For employees to have access to data that they should not have represents a tremendous security risk," says Federlein. "By integrating a provisioning product like Xellerate with the Sun identity management platform based on our underlying directory server technology, we provide a comprehensive solution."

For Xellerate customers, the link into the Sun Identity Server automated the process of entering user information into the system, says Nancy Colwell, senior vice president of marketing for Thor.

Users of Thor's Xellerate are able to manage security permissions as part of the automated user provisioning features of the software. The integration with the Sun ONE Identity Server means that information can be exchanged such that when a customer changes an access provision using the Thor product, the change is reflected in the Sun ONE environment.

Thor prices Xcellerate starting at $15/user and decreasing as users are added. It also charged based on the number of systems targeted by provisioning. A customer with 5,000 to 7,000 users provisioning 15 targets would pay in the range of $400,000 to $700,000 for Xellerate.

Both Thor and Sun support the Liberty Alliance project for standardizing the way user identities are managed across enterprise systems; Sun is a founding member. The consistency with that standard helped to make the integration between the two products easier, the companies indicated.