News

Start-up revs virtual directory

• By Rich Seeley
• October 22, 2003

Directory services are one of the less-enthralling aspects of development today. Radiant Logic (www.radiantlogic.com), Novato, Calif., a start-up maker of virtual directory technology, sees room for improvement here.

This week the company launched RadiantOne 3.0, an infrastructure for identity management (IdM) that uses what the company describes as virtualization and synchronization services that can enable "on demand" directory services, said Michel Prompt, CEO and co-founder. The technology combines virtual directory technology with directory storage, LDAP routing and load balancing, synchronization services and tools for identity infrastructure. The new product is designed to simplify integration for identity management among disparate applications such as e-mail and database access, Prompt said.

"If you use an application server like [IBM] WebSphere or BEA [WebLogic], they would provide you a way to package your application in the form of beans and to create authorization for that," he said. "But for you to associate the authorization and the policies with the people in the group that can access the information, you need to have an aggregated list of all the people from the groups. This can be a big pain because having access to all these people or groups across applications like Active Directory, e-mail and database requires lots of low-level work."

Prompt said a virtual directory like the one his company has developed can ease that process. "What we provide is an umbrella that aggregates and integrates all this information on the fly so that in the end, you only have to call us and on your behalf we call Active Directory, Lotus Notes or an application to provide you with the information about the user, password and possible authorization attributes," Prompt said. "That is the role of the virtual directory -- to act as an integration layer so that in the end, an application calls only one source to get all the lists of people, groups and authorizations."

Radiant Logic lists Freddie Mac, Daimler Chrysler and Telecom Italia as customers that have begun using its technology in the past 12 months.