NetManage Positions Software for iSeries Single Sign-On

by Alex Woodie

OS/400 shops should be able to easily integrate host access products from NetManage into their sign-on (SSO) environment as a result of the newly added support for Kerberos authentication that NetManage announced last week. In addition to simplifying user log-ons with SSO, RUMBA 7.4 and OnWeb 7.2 both bring additional security enhancements, including new Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Secure Shell (SSH) features.

The price of forgotten passwords continues to add costs to corporate operations and suck profits from the bottom line. According to research firm Gartner, 25 to 40 percent of all calls to the help desk are for password resets, and it costs a company $14 to $28 each time it has to reset a password after a user has forgotten or lost it.

The software industry has responded to this problem with numerous password-synchronization and self-service password-reset applications over the past few years. In 2003, when IBM released OS/400 V5R2, it included its SSO strategy, which combined a technology called Enterprise Identity Mapping (EIM) with Kerberos.

Under IBM's SSO scheme, EIM basically provides the underlying plumbing for sharing user registry information among applications, while Kerberos provides a strong cross-platform authentication technique that's used across the industry--perhaps most importantly, on Microsoft Windows.

With support for Kerberos authentication, OS/400 shops that run NetManage's popular RUMBA emulator on Windows clients can participate in SSO. In doing so, they can take a big step toward alleviating their users' problem of remembering user IDs and passwords for the multitude of applications they must access, by enabling them to access all their applications with a single login process.

Other new features with RUMBA 7.4 include "embedded" support for SSL and SSH encryption, enabling secure terminal and FTP sessions. The product has also been certified for Windows 2000 and Windows XP, NetManage says.

When RUMBA users are ready to move up from terminal emulation, and begin to rework their user interfaces and workflows so users can access certain parts of their applications and data from Web browsers or other devices, NetManage has its OnWeb software, which forms the basis for its composite application and service oriented architecture (SOA) strategy.

OnWeb version 7.4, like the new release of RUMBA, also brings Kerberos support for enabling SSO in iSeries environments, and includes the new SSL and SSH security improvements. Other new features include support for running on Linux and AIX servers, which complements the previous support for Windows and Solaris servers.

NetManage is also talking up its new collection of adapters and connectors for OnWeb, which make it easier to integrate disparate technologies into composite applications. NetManage now offers connectors for J.D. Edwards, SAP R/3, PeopleSoft, Siebel Systems, and Oracle applications, as well as CICS, IMS, MQSeries, DB2, Sybase, Informix, CA-IDMS, and Oracle data stores. NetManage also says it has enhanced OnWeb's monitoring and reporting capabilities with this release.

Both RUMBA 7.4 and OnWeb 7.2 will start shipping April 4. Pricing for RUMBA starts at $375 per seat. Pricing for the OnWeb server starts at $12,000 for Windows and $15,000 for the Unix platforms. For more information, visit www.netmanage.com.