CHICAGO, Sept. 28 /PRNewswire/ -- Abridean today announced that Bloor Research has recognized it as the easiest to implement provisioning solution in its recent 2005 Report on Identity Management. Bloor Research, which provides industry leading IT research, advisory, and strategic consulting services, gave high marks to Abridean for ease of implementation, fit for purpose, value for money, and architecture, and awarded it a Silver Medal in the very competitive provisioning category.

According to Fran Howarth, practice leader at Bloor Research and author of the report, "The research undertaken by Bloor Research for its identity and access management technologies Bullseye report has identified Abridean as one of the leading vendors in this sector of the market. It has been awarded the Silver Medal among provisioning vendors and has been positioned as a Challenger."

To determine the rating, Bloor singled out the following key aspects of Abridean's solution:

-- A flexible, policy-based architecture that speeds configuration, simplifies technical integration challenges, and simplifies ongoing system management -- A feature-rich Compliance Module that automates key processes and provides sophisticated audit reporting, thus lowering the cost of compliance -- The ability to manage identity data in complex heterogeneous environments -- A pricing and deployment model that allows customers to focus their resources on real pain points and not buy a more complex solution than they need to meet their objectives

"Identity management technologies, driven by the dual requirements to improve the efficiency of internal operations and comply with industry and government regulations, have received renewed impetus in recent months and are likely to remain of prime importance for the coming decade," continued Fran.

"We are thrilled to have Bloor Research recognize our leadership in user management and provisioning solutions, specifically related to our flexibility and ability to help customers lower the cost of achieving regulatory compliance," said Sean Sears, CEO of Abridean. "Abridean is laser-focused on provisioning solutions and remains dedicated to providing innovative, best-of- breed solutions to our customers."

About Bloor Research

Founded in 1989, Bloor Research is one of the world's leading IT research, analysis and consultancy organizations -- distributing research and analysis to IT user and vendor organizations throughout the world via online subscriptions, tailored research services and consultancy projects.

Bloor Research's research and analysis have been acknowledged by the world's press, other industry analysts and commentators as some of the most authoritative work ever produced on computing and business issues. The accuracy and integrity of our research and its impartial conclusions have earned Bloor Research international acclaim.

About Abridean

Abridean's flexible identity management solutions enable organizations to comply with government regulations, enforce security policies, and lower IT administration costs by automating and controlling employee access to networks, applications, data and devices.

Organizations rely on Abridean technology to quickly and easily deploy user management and provisioning solutions that fully automate user account set-up and maintenance -- ensuring that users get rapid access to every system they need, and that the organization gains all of the control and audit reporting they need.

Abridean's flexible policy-based architecture easily adapts to an organization's unique administrative processes and includes sophisticated workflow, role and rule based entitlement definitions, easily-configurable use cases, automated reconciliation of security exceptions, and advanced audit logging and compliance reporting. Abridean's lightweight connector framework ensures support for a wide variety of target systems and platforms.

Over 2500 companies currently use Abridean technology to manage users and provision applications. For more information, visit http://www.abridean.com/ or call 1-877-520-4277.

CONTACT: Kristie Heins Fox of Ruder Finn, Inc., +1-312-329-3985, or
heinsfoxk@ruderfinn.com

Web site: http://www.abridean.com/