The Problem

Many enterprises grant access to information on a per-application basis. For example, an employee might have to set up a user name and password to access the company’s health benefits administration web site. The same employee must use a different user name and password to access the Accounting Department online forms. Within the same enterprise, a customer sets up a user name and password to access the public branch of the company web site. For each web site or service, an administrator must convert the enterprise user’s input into a data format that the service can recognize. Each service added to the enterprise must be provisioned and maintained separately.