TOM KEMP'S CENTRIFY BLOG

Centrify Customers Speak Out

Monday, April 16, 2007

Recently a number of Centrify customers have been featured in press articles from publications such as NetworkWorld, SearchEnterpriseLinux and ComputerWorld. It is really neat to see customers talking to the press about the positive experiences they are having with our products, and we really appreciate these customers taking the time to publicly talk about our company and products. As a company, we like to back our products with records of deployments that demonstrate our solutions' ability to scale across a diverse set of environments. It is always nice to be able to see press articles that offer proof to potential new customers of our large deployment base of satisfied enterprise customers.

Research in Motion (RIM), the makers of the ever-popular Blackberry devices, recently talked to SearchEnterpriseLinux about their experiences with Centrify. As the article notes:

Research in Motion (RIM) systems architect Ian Brown wanted to give his administrators the same central identity management authentication functionality for their Linux and Unix machines that they enjoyed with Microsoft Windows Server and Active Directory -- but it just wasn't happening.

They looked at home grown solutions as well as another commercial solution, but they passed on these because they did not like the highly intrusive changes these solutions required to Active Directory, especially the schema changes:

"That's not really the best approach because if you have to go to Microsoft with a problem, they're going to tell you 'sorry, you installed extensions to LDAP,'" he said. And when RIM calculated ROI for an internally developed application, Brown said it became evident that it would be too challenging and expensive.

This customer dared to compare multiple solutions and in the end found the right solution with DirectControl that "worked out of the box." And, as is the case with other customers, DirectControl helps RIM address compliance issues:

"Obviously RIM is a publicly traded company, so when the SOX auditors were looking at the access control to our systems, [we] were already covered with Centrify," Brown said. "Essentially, we could just print off a DirectControl report and say these people had access to this Linux system and when."

With DirectControl, Brown could instantaneously produce this login documentation. He could then correlate that information to any maintenance ticket ever generated at RIM. Before DirectControl, Brown estimated his staff of six spent dozens of hours each week on local server administration -- work they now complete in seconds.

RIM is also a beta site of our new DirectAudit product and is quite excited about what it can offer:

The successful relationship between RIM and Centrify led to a beta test earlier this year for a new auditing product set to launch later in 2007. The product, called DirectAudit, addresses another shortcoming in Unix -- that I/O captures are stored in a flat file on the server.

"If you are trying to audit an [administrator or user], you want that information to be transparent as well," Brown said.

Another DirectAudit beta customer and DirectControl customer, Yodlee, was also recently featured in an article in ComputerWorld. Yodlee delivers innovative financial applications that make online banking more profitable. Here is what they had to say about DirectAudit:

What we really like about DirectAudit is we have the ability to get into a console and use some user-friendly queries to get session information," said Manohar Nayak, senior architect of network security at Yodlee Inc., which provides applications to financial institutions to support online banking. "Then we can play back what happened from a security or on operational perspective."

Nayak said the altering capabilities in the software also let Yodlee configure the software to provide notifications when particular events are happening in the network.

"Previously, we have a lot of manual processes to make those things work. There was a lot of overhead," Nayak said. "DirectAudit and DirectControl make those tasks simpler."

Last but not least, Automated Trading Desk (ATD), another financial institution that leverages Centrify's technology was also featured in a recent press article. Here is what was written up in an interview with Carlos O'Ryan, chief technology officer of ATD:

O'Ryan oversees a data center comprised of 700 Linux and Windows-based IBM BladeCenter LS20s and LS21s. Like many Linux administrators, O'Ryan had the tedious task of going server to server with password updates. With 700 servers needing individual attention every time an employee left the company, oftentimes ATD's "best practice" was to do nothing at all. "That was basically our big headache; we did not have any way to centrally control access," O'Ryan said.

With Centrify's DirectControl, O'Ryan estimated ATD saved approximately three-quarters of a person per year in personnel costs. "It's been great to have the ability to change configuration parameters from one central point. It was relatively hard to do before," he said. Password and permissions management, which O'Ryan described as "daunting," also became centrally managed.

What is quite exciting to me about all these customer testimonials is that collectively these three customers have deployed our software in production on 1000s of systems. If you want more great evidence of Centrify product deployments at large customers, please check out our customer success story webpage, where you can read more customer case studies from our 200+ customers. And again we really appreciate these three customers' taking the time to talk to press about their experiences.

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