Novell and Atos Origin form global partnership to jointly deliver innovative compliance and governance solutions

Premiere and INEM first European customers of joint offering
Salt Lake City (BrainShare 2008) and Paris, March 2008 -

Novell and Atos Origin, an international IT services company, are partnering to deliver new joint compliance and governance solutions. Leveraging Novell’s award-winning identity and security management technologies and Atos Origin’s consulting, systems integration and managed operations services, the companies will deliver end-to-end solutions to allow customers to meet stringent security, governance and compliance requirements. As a result, customers can reduce both risk and cost through automating their user provisioning, access and security monitoring processes.

“We are very pleased to see the cooperation between Novell and Atos Origin,” said Günter Weinrauch, vice president of Information Management for Premiere, Germany’s leading cable TV operator. “Like any customer, we want our key service and software partners to work together to deliver solutions tailored for our environment so we don’t have to spend time and resources internally in deploying and integrating technology. We’ve already seen the first fruits of the partnership in a core infrastructure solution delivered by the two companies, and we look forward to expanding this to cover security and management solutions, as well.”

Eugenio Garcia, chief security officer at Instituto de Empleo Servicio Publico de Empleo Estatal (INEM), the Spanish State Public Employment Services, said, “Novell’s solutions contribute to INEM’s strategy to focus more strongly on identity, security and access management. Over the recent years, both Atos Origin and Novell have proven to be reliable providers. We applaud the strategic partnership between these two companies as they are key providers for INEM.”

“Our partnership with Novell expands our leadership in the identity and security management arena and will help us better address our customers’ security challenges,” said Francis Delacourt, executive vice president of global managed operations at Atos Origin. “Novell’s technology can proactively address business needs for a real-time, comprehensive compliance solution that integrates people, systems and processes. With our strong customer relationships worldwide, including our unique position with clients in the IT outsourcing market, Atos Origin is very well positioned to deliver mission-critical governance and compliance solutions to large customers.”

Focus
The partnership will initially focus on identity and security management and will be rolled out in major European countries. The three areas of initial focus will be:

* Identity management and provisioning: automate and integrate employee provisioning and de-provisioning to reduce costs, meet compliance requirements and map to existing business processes.
* Access management: grant secure access to users, both inside and outside the company, from any location, integrating with existing authentication frameworks.
* Security information and event monitoring: monitor, remediate and report on security incidents on the network, meeting governance and compliance requirements.

“The importance of IT security is now top of mind for business executives as well as governments and regulators, given the public focus on major security incidents over the past year,” said analyst Eric Domage, research manager, security products and services, for IDC. “Global partnerships such as the agreement announced by Novell and Atos Origin will be important in delivering efficient security solutions to IT organizations, which face increasing regulation as well as growing pressure to address business concerns.”

Ron Hovsepian, president and CEO of Novell, said, “As a leading global IT services firm, Atos Origin is a great partner for Novell for expanding our governance and compliance solutions in the market. Today’s announcement is another important step forward in Novell’s strategy of leveraging strategic partners to drive our product growth. We look forward to expanding our joint collaboration with Atos Origin over time to bring additional Linux and systems management solutions to customers.”
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