Sun Microsystems announced the availability of Sun OpenSSO Express, a new offering that provides enterprise support and indemnification for the technologies available in the OpenSSO project. OpenSSO is an open source, identity management project, providing highly scalable, high-performance single sign-on, access management, federation, and secure web services capabilities.

New versions of Sun OpenSSO Express will be released approximately every three months to provide fast moving organizations with early access to the latest technologies available in the OpenSSO community. New or existing customers with a Sun Java System Access Manager, Sun Java Identity Management Suite or Java Enterprise System license or subscription will receive Sun OpenSSO Express at no additional charge. Support from Sun's technical team is available in three different levels: standard, premium and premium plus.

“Enterprise software customers are increasingly choosing open source software because it gives them greater flexibility, access to cutting-edge technology and faster time to market. Over the past year and a half, we've seen tremendous interest and participation in the OpenSSO community from hundreds of companies around the world,” said Mark Herring, vice president of marketing, Software Infrastructure, Sun Microsystems. “Sun is delivering Sun OpenSSO Express in response to demand from users of OpenSSO, who would like to leverage Sun's expertise in providing enterprise-grade support and indemnification for open source software.”

With more than 700 members, the OpenSSO project is attracting large enterprises with extensive identity infrastructures, who want an open source, identity management solution with Sun's support and indemnification. OpenSSO is now backed by Sun's world-class support, giving customers the choice of deploying the latest OpenSSO releases to help address their web access management or federation challenges right away instead of waiting for the next commercial product release.

“Medavie Blue Cross provides personalized service to more than a million members in Canada and due to the needs of our business, we couldn't afford to wait for the next commercial version of Sun's federation and access management software, so we joined the OpenSSO community and started using the OpenSSO Express product, which was a great decision because we've received full support and indemnification from Sun. Since then, we've implemented the OpenSSO version of the product and took advantage of its features. This approach has helped us keep pace with our needs and it improved our time to market. Plus, we were able to have access to Sun's most innovative web access management and federation offerings in open source,” said Vince Blanchard, director of architecture and new technology, Medavie Blue Cross.

“We are using Sun OpenSSO Express as an extension of our Datagrid Suite, which provides application developers with a single point of access to all their application data from multiple, heterogeneous data sources. The integration with Sun's federation technology enables Datagrid users to create secure, federated mash-ups of partner content,” said Jeff Cortley, vice president, Subscriber Data Management Business Division, Alcatel-Lucent. “By taking advantage of the OpenSSO project, we are able to leverage the most current and innovative identity and federation features for the Datagrid solution.”