Optimal IdM
Providing End-to-End Identity Management

Headquartered in Lutz, FL, Optimal IdM is a leading provider of identity management software solutions. Co-founded by the trio Michael Brengs, Larry Aucoin and John Maring.

Optimal IdM’s flagship product, the Virtual Identity Server (VIS), is geared towards Microsoft’s Active Directory, which is used by 90 percent of the companies worldwide to store user identities. Developed entirely in .NET managed code, VIS behaves as a Microsoft centric virtual directory that enhances and extends the functionality of Active Directory.

Many companies today have multiple directory services deployed in their environments. Though a sound operational process, this results in user identity information being scattered across multiple separate directory repositories, making it difficult to deploy application to users across these disparate and siloed repositories. VIS solves this issue by providing a single, joined view of data from the separate directories. VIS connects to and can join an unlimited number of identity stores and make them virtually appear as one. This allows the customer to point applications to VIS, through which they can authenticate and authorize users wherever they reside.

We plan to continue offering our large enterprise customers solutions that meet their needs in the most comprehensive and complete solution as possible. We are seeing tremendous growth in our OFIS cloud based identity management solution and will continue to drive these successes

With built-in connection pooling and full support for failover and load balancers, VIS scales horizontally or vertically to meet the needs of enterprise deployments.

The Optimal Federation & Identity Services (OFIS), another product of Optimal IdM, eliminates the cost and complexity of implementing Federation on premise by providing single sign-on in a Federated web scenario in Optimal IdM’s cloud. OFIS is a complete cloud based Federation solution that allows organizations to Federate to both on premise and cloud applications, as well as Federating with other organizations. OFIS is available in both a private cloud offering as well as a shared cloud where multiple customer tenants run on shared hardware.

Beyond offering Federation services, OFIS provides a complete cloud based identity management system providing services such as self-service and password/ profile management. For organizations that do not implement Federation, the self-registration module allows them to self register an account that is hosted in the cloud. Using OFIS, customers can Federate internal users, external users and cloud hosted users to applications both on premise as well as in the cloud from a 100 percent cloud hosted solution eliminating the need for a costly and complex onpremise federation solution.

OFIS’ built-in entitlements framework engine provides an easy-to-use and powerful authorization engine. Application administrators define entitlements and who can request access to the entitlement. Using the web-interface, users can request access to the entitlement and delegated administrators can approve/deny the request that is routed via e-mail. Once approved, these additional entitlements are added to the claims that are sent in the federated request. This provides a very easy to use, fine grained authorization engine that can be used by all applications cloud and on premise.

The company’s clientele form top Fortune 500 companies covering a broad range of business verticals including pharmaceuticals, banking, retailing and insurance, often with extremely complex environments involving hundreds of untrusted Active Directory forests. “Our technology is not only easy to install but is extremely powerful. In our space, finding feature-rich enterprise grade products that are also easy to install and configure is hard to find. Our software was built from the ground up with this in mind,” explains Brengs.