What if you could better comply with regulatory requirements, strengthen your security, and improve efficiency and productivity? Delivering centralized identity and access management is one of the top compliance and security challenges facing IT departments today. Increasingly, corporate officers require IT managers to meet a growing number of compliance requirements—including managing and auditing who has access to key systems and policies, and the reports to prove it. Yet today’s heterogeneous computing environments make this task difficult. Centrify set out to change this.

Founded in 2004 by Tom Kemp, a former co-founder of NetIQ, and senior executives from industry leaders such as Microsoft, Computer Associates,Novell, Netscape and others, Centrify has quickly become a leading provider of Microsoft Active Directory®-based auditing, access control, and identity management solutions for non-Microsoft platforms. The company tag line says it all: Simplify, Identify, Centrify.

With Centrify, customers can fully leverage their existing investment in Active Directory by comprehensively extending Active Directory’s access control and identity management capabilities to heterogeneous systems, web applications, databases and storage platforms.

As an example, Centrify DirectControl secures a company’s non-Microsoft platforms using the same authentication, authorization and Group Policy services deployed for the Microsoft Windows® environment. And Centrify DirectAudit complements DirectControl by delivering auditing, logging and real-time monitoring of user activity on non-Microsoft systems. Together, these products help its customers improve IT efficiency, better comply with regulatory requirements, and centrally audit and control access to heterogeneous computing environments.

The reality of today’s heterogeneous computing infrastructure is that different applications and systems have different identity stores. This means that IT staff have to use multiple tools to set up a user to access multiple systems—and end users have to grapple with remembering multiple usernames and passwords. Yet with Centrify DirectControl, organizations now have a single tool in Active Directory that manages user accounts, provisions users, and configures systems.

Explains CEO Kemp, “With our solution, helpdesk requests for password resets go way down, freeing IT resources for higher-value tasks. With DirectAudit, IT staff can also perform immediate, in-depth troubleshooting by replaying and reporting on user activity that may have contributed to system failures. We’ve taken a unique approach to solving our customers’ identity management challenges, delivering a powerful but elegantly simple solution that ‘does the right thing’ for their Windows, UNIX, Linux, Mac, Java/J2EE and Oracle/DB2/SAP platforms.”

While existing solutions can help these organizations consolidate and centralize their identity and access management, Centrify says they are highly proprietary, very costly to deploy, lack comprehensive auditing capabilities and require painful changes to a company’s existing IT infrastructure. Centrify’s vision is to tie these disparate systems and applications into a secure, connected computing infrastructure with Active Directory at its center.

Active Directory is a standards-based, enterprise-class directory that most companies already own. In fact, the Gartner Group projects that by the end of 2010, at least 90 percent of midsize and large enterprises will have deployed Active Directory in their internal infrastructure.

“We chose Microsoft Active Directory because of its support for standards such as LDAP and Kerberos and its wide-scale deployment in customer environments. We selected Microsoft SQL Server 2005 as our underlying database for our DirectAudit solution because of its scalability and price/performance,” says Kemp.

The company’s vision is to integrate non-Microsoft systems such as UNIX, Linux and Mac into Active Directory. It also integrates non-Microsoft applications such as Apache, DB2, WebLogic, WebSphere, JBoss and SAP into Active Directory. Centrify builds software that is installed on those systems and applications, but then ties them into the Microsoft Active Directory backend.

As an example, the company’s Direct-Control solution extends Microsoft Active Directory to more than 100+versions of UNIX, Linux, and Mac.

Centrify claims to be one of the only companies to deliver the complete ‘3As’ of identity management—authentication, access control and auditing—leveraging Active Directory across the enterprise.

So far, the strategy seems to be working. Centrify boasts more than 300 customers, including 30 percent of the Fortune 50, more than 40 resellers worldwide, and $36 million in venture funding from investors including the Mayfield Fund, Accel Partners, Sigma Partners and INVESCO Private Capital. A Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, they are also a member of Microsoft’s SecureIT Alliance and the Interop Vendor Alliance.

And recently, the company reported year-over-year revenue growth of more than 400 percent, and a doubling of its customer base.

According to Kemp, the Microsoft Emerging Business Team was instrumental in Centrify’s early stages of development—introducing them to key Microsoft product personnel and confirming its product synergy with related Microsoft offerings.

Says Kemp, “While I was at NetIQ, I got a great appreciation for what it is to partner with Microsoft. If you have the right story and message, even a small company, can leverage the size and presence of Microsoft and go far.”

Clearly, Centrify is on its way.

Download Centrify’s success story in PDF format.