Entrust and Waveset Announce Strategic Alliance To Deliver Secure Identity Management Solutions

Entrust launches Secure Identity Management Solution; Waveset adds strong security services to its identity management product line

07 Apr 2003

DALLAS, TX and AUSTIN, TX - Entrust, Inc. [NASDAQ: ENTU], a global leader in securing digital identities and information, and Waveset Technologies, Inc., a leading provider of secure identity management solutions, today announced a strategic alliance that leverages each company's technology and expertise to bring to market tightly integrated, comprehensive identity management solutions.

The alliance enables Entrust to launch its Entrust Secure Identity Management Solution, a comprehensive and cost-effective offering that allows governments and businesses to easily deploy and manage identities for a broad range of enterprise and Web applications. Additionally, Waveset will incorporate Entrust's strong security capabilities in a version of its Waveset Lighthouse? solution to enable highly secure management of enterprise identities in sensitive environments. The two companies also intend to jointly develop and market new products and solutions, and collaborate on standards development within their joint areas of expertise. 

A High-Value Business Alliance

The Entrust-Waveset relationship reflects an increasing desire among governments and businesses to deploy integrated identity management offerings that reduce administrative costs and provide comprehensive, secure administration and audit of user identities and access controls.

Waveset's identity management technology, which includes provisioning management, password management, identity profile management and auditing, provides organizations with a solution for managing user access privileges and identity data across a broad range of legacy, client/server and Web-based environments. Entrust's portfolio of security solutions for desktop, Web portal, and Web services-based applications enables accountability and privacy for information exchanged over the Internet and enterprise networks. 

Together, Entrust and Waveset offer customers a secure identity management strategy that:

• efficiently and cost-effectively manages the complete lifecycles of user identities, both inside and outside of the organization
• can be extended to secure identities across diverse applications and environments
• enables accountability for administrative activities and provides privacy for stored user identities and information

"The Entrust and Waveset relationship appears different from other identity management alliances of convenience," said Dan Blum, senior vice-president and research director with the Burton Group. "In addition to co-marketing and functional integration, Entrust and Waveset plan bi-directional technology sharing that promises to add significant value to both product lines." *

"Identity management plays a critical part in accommodating a growing demand for access by external and internal users, and in supporting fundamental business changes being driven by the growth in Web-based and wireless access to enterprise systems," said Rick Perry, director of enterprise operations and security at The Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway.  "Entrust's and Waveset's commitment to delivering comprehensive, secure identity management solutions holds significant promise for forward-looking organizations like BNSF, which are looking to improve organizational efficiencies using new technologies."

Entrust Secure Identity Management Solution

 Capitalizing on the alliance, Entrust has tightly integrated its leading Web access management software and other strong security services with Waveset's identity management technology to launch the Entrust Secure Identity Management Solution.

The solution features an easy-to-use administration portal, and offers customers a comprehensive approach to provisioning and managing their identities, complete with advanced security services such as strong authentication of administrators, policy-based authorization control, digitally signed transactions and encrypted workflow information. The Entrust Secure Identity Management Solution reduces administrative costs through self-service and delegated administration, and provides centralized password synchronization, making it much easier for users to access applications while minimizing helpdesk costs.

In addition, the solution provides a highly scalable architecture that enables rapid, "out-of-the-box" deployment and seamless integration within an organization's current business processes. Entrust's Secure Identity Management Solution is also set apart from competitive offerings in its ability to provide identity management for service-oriented architectures and Web services. 
  
Waveset Lighthouse Strong Security Services

Adding Entrust's strong security services to Waveset Lighthouse enhances the secure management of identities for those organizations that require a higher standard of protection.   Specifically, Lighthouse will provide certificate-based authentication to its user interface and digitally signed and encrypted email transactions for managerial requests and approvals.  This extended capability provides a significant convenience for business users on the move to receive and approve requests for access changes - without having to interact with the management application directly.  In addition, Lighthouse will support a digitally-signed audit log of all user and administrator activity related to identity permissions and profiles, providing organizations that face security audits or corporate liability issues a credible record of action. Importantly, this level of assurance is often required for admissibility in legal proceedings.

"A new standard of protection is emerging in today's business environment that raises the 'security' bar for public companies, private companies and government entities alike," said Michael D'Eath, vice-president of corporate and business development at Waveset. "Our strategic alliance with Entrust provides organizations the solutions they need to ensure that corporate policies are in place, and are effectively applied in a way that protects an organization's most sensitive assets."

"Entrust's global customer base, which consists primarily of large enterprises and governments, represents the types of organizations that have a demonstrated need for Waveset's innovative identity management solution," said Bill Conner, chairman, chief executive officer, and president of Entrust. "Extending Entrust's leadership in digital identity and information security solutions with Waveset's expertise offers our customers an industry-leading approach to rapidly deploying secure identity management. We look forward to expanding our valuable relationship with Waveset."

Availability and Web Seminar

The Entrust Secure Identity Management Solution will be commercially available in June 2003, direct from Entrust or authorized channels. Waveset Lighthouse with strong security services will be available in Q3 of this year.

In support of the strategic alliance, Entrust and Waveset will be co-hosting a Web Seminar on April 29, 2003 at 2:00 p.m. Eastern, and will feature a demo of the Entrust Secure Identity Management Solution. To register, please go to http://www.entrust.com/events/identitymanagement.htm

About Waveset Technologies, Inc.

Waveset Technologies, Inc. is a provider of identity management software that enables the secure control of business initiatives across enterprise, intranet and extranet environments. Waveset's unique, non-invasive approach delivers rapid ROI while ensuring that customers' mission-critical information assets are protected. Founded by former executives at IBM, BMC, Microsoft and Novell, Waveset counts industry leaders such as GMAC Financial Services, Kraft Foods, First American Corporation, The Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway, American Red Cross, ProBusiness Services, Inc., Household International, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas City,  7-Eleven, Inc., Dynegy and numerous other Fortune 500 companies among its customers. Waveset is funded by Lightspeed Ventures Partners, Austin Ventures, Origin Partners, Silverton Partners, AV Labs, and other private investors.

Waveset and the Waveset logo are trademarks of Waveset Technologies, Inc.  All other company and product names may be trademarks, registered trademarks, or service marks of the company with which they are associated.

This press release contains forward?looking statements relating to commercial relationships into which Entrust is entering, and the expected benefits of such relationships, and such statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties.  Among the important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements are delays or failure to conclude additional agreements in respect to additional aspects of the Entrust and Waveset alliance, delays in the training of Entrust's sales/marketing forces in respect to Waveset products, coordination of sales and marketing training between Entrust and Waveset, delays in product development and integration, delays in coordination of development between Entrust and Waveset, undetected software errors or bugs in the Entrust and Waveset products, competitive pressures, market acceptance of the separate and combined technologies of Entrust and Waveset, changes in customer requirements, competitive pressures, governmental regulations, general economic conditions and the risk factors detailed from time to time in Entrust's periodic reports and registration statements filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including without limitation Entrust's Quarterly Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2002.  Entrust cautions investors that it might not update any or all of the foregoing forward-looking statements.

* Additional Industry Analyst Supporting Quotes

"Early deployments of comprehensive identity management solutions have uncovered the need for better security capabilities, both for identity management administration as well as an integrated element of identity management.  The need for identity management is actually the need for secure identity management. Enterprises can expect to see, among other steps, more alliances between traditional security vendors and identity management/provisioning vendors to deliver this need."  -- Earl Perkins, Senior Program Director, Technology Research Services at META Group

"The strategic partnership between Entrust and Waveset Technologies is a win-win situation for the enterprise. The most striking features of this partnership include its vision, intra-company cooperation, and ability to deliver solutions that are focused on customer needs."  -- Jim Hurley, Vice-President, Security and Privacy, Aberdeen Group

"The need by public enterprises to attest to their internal controls infrastructure in support of regulations such as the GLB Act, HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley is putting the spotlight on the security of the IT resource access request process.  Strong authentication of the users involved in the process - request, approval and fulfillment, the integrity and non-repudiation of the access request transaction itself and a strong, secure audit trail of the access request process activities - will become important features of the Identity and Access Management solutions within these enterprises." -- Roberta Witty, Research Director, Security and Privacy, Gartner

"Identity management delivers direct business value and measurable ROI in four key areas:  User productivity and empowerment, IT management efficiency and help desk cost avoidance, Application development agility, and Security auditing and compliance." -- Giga Research, a subsidiary of Forrester Research "Justifying the 2003 IT Budget: Identity Management Brings Quantifiable ROI to Security", Jonathan Penn, Oct 22/2002