Novell Approaches 6,000 Customers for Its Identity and Security Solutions

Novell today announced a major achievement for its identity and Security software – rapidly approaching 6,000 customers worldwide, Novell's identity and Security offerings increase operational efficiency and user productivity, enforce compliance with industry regulations and simplify and automate identity management processes. Demonstrating its scalability and flexibility, Novell's products are being widely deployed across many different heterogeneous IT environments, ranging from Fortune 500 companies to small businesses in a variety of industries including financial services, healthcare, government and education. A few of the thousands of customers using Novell's identity and Security solutions are Abercrombie & Fitch, BASF, Catholic Healthcare West, Endesa, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fairfax County Public Schools, Frankfurt Airport, Intesa Sanpaolo, JohnsonDiversey, Leesport Financial Corp., Lufthansa, New York City Transit, Royal Philips Electronics and Toll Brothers.

“End-to-end, secure identity and access management (IAM) within a distributed systems infrastructure is a key goal of most organizations today,” said Sally Hudson, research director, Security Products and Services of IDC. “Novell has grown its identity and Security products steadily over the past several years and is constantly working to extend the capabilities of its identity and security product suite. The company has consistently held a leadership position in this market and is especially strong in the manufacturing, financial, healthcare and government sectors.”

Cobb County School District Streamlines User Provisioning

Cobb County School District recently selected Novell to centralize its identity infrastructure and comply with Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) for protecting student and faculty information. The second-largest school district in Georgia, Cobb County is located in North metro Atlanta, serves more than 107,000 students in 113 schools and employs 18,000 staff members. Cobb County School District has realized significant benefits from its identity deployment – reduction in time spent on provisioning 125,000 users to 24 hours from two months, elimination of nearly 400 hours of password-related helpdesk calls per month, and automated identity management across multiple applications including its student information system, Novell® GroupWise®, Oracle* and SQL* databases, Remedy, Mac* Open LDAP, Linux*, Microsoft* Windows* and Macintosh* platforms.

“Novell has delivered an automated, centralized identity system allowing us to meet compliance requirements and synchronize identity information across heterogeneous platforms and applications,” said Chris Ragsdale, chief technology officer of Cobb County School District. “Manually creating and updating 125,000 accounts each year was a time-consuming and expensive project for us. By implementing Novell's identity and Security solutions, our school district has automated identity management, saving two months of manual effort and an estimated $150,000 per year.”

Greater Baltimore Medical HealthCare Addresses Compliance Requirements

Greater Baltimore Medical HealthCare, another recent customer, consists of the Greater Baltimore Medical Center, a 292-bed acute care hospital serving nearly 22,000 inpatients and providing approximately 60,000 emergency room visits annually; Hospice of Baltimore; and the GBMC Foundation. GBMC has implemented Novell's identity and Security solutions to synchronize employee identity information among its clinical applications and provide single sign-on to a variety of applications, including Novell GroupWise, MEDITECH, Lawson HR, Kronos, Microsoft Active Directory*, Citrix* and the center's radiology system. GBMC now has the ability to track access to patient data based on user identity, helping the organization to comply with HIPAA requirements.

“Novell provided a comprehensive identity management solution that allows us to do everything we want to do,” said Pat Duty, desktop manager at GBMC. “We get it all without having to purchase additional hardware and have been able to eliminate the problem of having a generic login to applications at GBMC, thus dramatically improving security and compliance.”

Novell Identity and Security Solutions

Novell's identity and Security solutions are designed to help enterprises with their most pressing business challenges of reducing the risk of identity and data theft, streamlining IT administration, enforcing business policies and proving compliance with government mandates. Our broad portfolio of identity-based solutions operate in heterogeneous environments, supporting many platforms and applications, allowing companies to leverage their existing IT investments. Novell's identity and Security solutions – which include Novell Identity Manager, Novell Access Manager™, Novell SecureLogin and Novell Sentinel™ – work well independently or can be integrated as part of a complete security solution.

“Novell is continually adapting our identity solutions to meet our customers' most pressing business challenges, which today are governance, risk management and compliance,” said Jim Ebzery, senior vice president of Identity and Security at Novell. “Novell makes it easier for our customers to automate and centralize their identity infrastructure by offering tools to simplify the deployment process, partnerships with specialized vendors to ensure an end-to-end identity infrastructure, and integration with our single sign-on and security information and event monitoring solutions to provide organizations with a holistic view of the people, processes and policies in their environment.”

For more information about Novell's identity and Security solutions, visit www.novell.com/management/security.