HID focuses on IT channel strategy

Photo from HID Global
Typically, HID cards have been used for physical access control, but recent partnerships with integrators and vendors in the IT and logical access markets have pushed convergence of access control to the card.

At this year's ISC West 2008 tradeshow, HID Global showcased a number of partnerships that it had in place for converged physical and logical access. Now, just a few days after the close of the tradeshow, the company has formally announced its IT Channel Program.

The channel program is designed to facilitate partnerships with IT vendors in the area of data and network authentication and access, and the move plays into HID Global's overall strategy of offering converged physical and logical access control.

In the mix are HID's Crescendo smart cards, which have been designed from the outset to be a platform for both physical and logical access control. The cards feature encryption and designed to support Microsoft's Identity Lifecycle Manager 2007, a system for managing smart cards in logical access usages.

The Crescendo cards couple a smart card chip with standard HID offerings for physical access communications, including iClass, proximity, DESFire, MIFARE, mag stripe and more.

By linking up with IT vendors and VARs in such areas as single sign-on, pre-boot authentication, disk encryption and digital signatures, HID Vice President Mark Scaparro said the company "strengthens our future offerings and allow users to utilize Crescendo to securely and conveniently open their doors, login to their PCs and access the data that’s critical to their jobs."

Members of the newly announced IT channel program include VAR/integration firm Avaleris, as well as vendors Imprivata and Passlogix, which both offer logical access and single sign-on solutions.

The eventual goal, according to HID, is that a converged Crescendo solution used with partners from the IT channel program would allow for such events as facility access, digital document "signing", hard drive, folder and document encryption, network log-in and even cashless vending.