Sun Microsystems' Federation Manager is designed to help companies enable federations across numerous partner sites quickly and efficiently. Identity Manager Service Provider Edition is a scalable identity administration solution that helps enable federated provisioning across trusted partner networks and provides identity services for registration, self-administration, delegated administration, and synchronization.

"Federation is a core component of identity management infrastructures, driven by the business needs for collaboration between partners," said Gerry Gebel, Burton Group senior analyst. "As the adoption rate for federation grows, enterprises require more sophisticated tools to manage all types of federation relationships and to easily enable existing and potential partners to join federated communities."

Gerry Gebel,
Burton Group

"Sun's identity management portfolio is designed to help companies accelerate their business without fear," said Sara Gates, vice president Identity Management, Sun Microsystems, Inc. "Achieving this goal, requires a security, privacy and identity management strategy to match the pace of business innovation. In particular, we see our new Federation Manager and Identity Manager Service Provider Edition products helping to enable the next phase of identity management, moving from the internet age to the extranet age, where millions of online businesses are securely connected to millions of partners and customers."

Using Federation Manager, companies can exchange standards-based authentication information, automatically link identities across multiple sites, and enrich end user interactions by integrating with underlying web services to provide personalized user information. Federation Manager adheres to accepted federated identity protocols, such as Security Assertions Markup Language (SAML), Liberty Identity Federation Framework (ID-FF), and Liberty Identity Web Services Framework (ID-WSF).

Federation Manager provides out of the box federation capabilities that use common user sign on mechanisms, such as those provided by the Solaris Operating System and other platforms to securely exchange credentials and user information with partners.

"BIPAC provides expert policy analysis, research and communications on campaigns and elections, and fosters business participation in the political process. Federated identity management enables BIPAC to allow employees to be politically active without having to divulge private information- such as, social security numbers, home addresses, phone numbers- to third-party vendors, reducing the risk of identity theft. Through Sun identity management products and the Liberty Alliance specifications, BIPAC has further committed to providing employers and employees the most secure way to be active in politics," said Greg Casey, president and CEO of BIPAC.

Based on  standards such as the Service Provisioning Markup Language (SPML), Identity Manager Service Provider Edition provides reusable identity administration capabilities that make it easy and cost-effective for companies to develop and deploy new applications, as well as customized services from third-party partners.