"This validation is important for our customers because it gives them the confidence to know that SOA Software's solutions will interoperate and integrate with any major security infrastructure they may have," said Roberto Medrano, executive vice president of SOA Software.  "Integration with TFIM offers a unique solution making it easier and less expensive for
business partners to securely integrate customer-centric applications."

The combination of SOA Software's XML VPN and IBM's TFIM provides simple management of federated identities in a trusted model.  For example, a user of a portal at one company can log on using an identifier specific to the portal.  This portal can then invoke services from business part portals that are able to map the original log on identifier to their own
internal identifier using TFIM to trust the originating company to authenticate the user.  This essentially provides powerful trust enabled single-sign-on for users between integrated applications at different companies.