Headlines:
Oracle Buys Thor and Octet String Wachovia Ready for Corillian Shift Liberty Alliance Eyes Strong Authentication Woodforest to Use Corillian Software
Oracle Buys Thor and Octet String
Oracle Corp. of Redwood City, Calif., announced Wednesday that it had bought a pair of software vendors, Thor Technologies Inc. and Octet String Inc., to expand its identity-management product line.
The prices were not disclosed. Identity-management products enable companies to set different levels of network access for different categories of employees.
Thor, based in New York, produces software that manages access control. Software from Octet String, of Schaumburg, Ill., helps companies "get a consistent view and a common view of this information that is distributed across multiple databases" said Hasan Rizvi, the vice president of Oracle identity and security management.
"We are building a complete solution, a comprehensive solution, that addresses the identity-management requirements of our customers," Mr. Rizvi said in a conference call. The challenge, he said, is "managing thousands of users and their access to tens, if not hundreds, of applications."
Wachovia Ready for Corillian Shift
Wachovia Corp. of Charlotte is ready to move online consumer banking customers from in-house to Corillian Corp. software.
Corillian, of Hillsboro, Ore., said Tuesday that Wachovia's 3.2 million current online banking customers will be converted over the next few months. New customers will be put on the Corillian package immediately.
The banking company announced the project in July of last year but delayed it in the first quarter, sending Corillian's income down.
In April, Wachovia revamped its home page in anticipation of the conversion and to eliminate some remaining traces of a legacy log-in system that dated to its days as First Union Corp. (First Union acquired Wachovia in 2001 and took its name.)
Wachovia has also been moving customers from online bill-payment software by Metavante Corp., to CheckFree Corp.'s package.
Liberty Alliance Eyes Strong Authentication
The Liberty Alliance, a group of technology and financial companies promoting the concept of "federated identity," has organized a new group to focus on strong authentication issues.
Roger Sullivan, the vice president of identity management at Oracle Corp. of Redwood City, Calif., said the Strong Authentication Expert Group is a response to guidance from the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council for banks to tighten their online authentication practices by the end of 2006.
"There is high, high urgency in the market," Mr. Sullivan said last week. "This is a natural extension of the federation framework that Liberty has brought to market to date."
The alliance - whose members include Bank of America Corp., American Express Co., Citigroup Inc., MasterCard International, and Visa U.S.A. - promotes open standards by which participants can create "circles of trust." Someone who logged in to one participating company's Web site could reach others' without logging in a second time, because the first site would warrant the user's identity.
The first step for the new group will be to develop "use cases" where federated identity using strong authentication, such as hardware and software tokens, smart cards, or biometrics, would be appropriate, Mr. Sullivan said. He estimated that such cases could be developed by mid-2006.
"This does not necessarily mean technical specifications," he added, but by working with other standard-setting bodies "we may be able to bring standards to the market more quickly."
Woodforest to Use Corillian Software
Woodforest National Bank of The Woodlands, Tex., has agreed to use online banking, payments, and fraud-protection software from Corillian Corp. of Hillsboro, Ore.
Corillian's announcement last week was the second that it had signed a customer for its fraud-protection software, Intelligent Authentication, which was introduced last month. The software verifies identity by comparing customers' activity online to patterns they established in previous sessions.
The bank, owned by Woodforest Financial Group Inc., also plans to use the Spanish-language capabilities of Corillian's online banking software to attract customers to its Internet banking service.
Corillian software will be "a tremendous asset for us as we look to expand our online banking services," said Charles Manning, the bank's president, in the vendor's press release.
