Courion and Citrix Announce Integrated User Provisioning and Enterprise Single Sign-On

LAS VEGAS - Courion Corporation, a Citrix Alliance Partner and a leading provider of enterprise user provisioning solutions, today announced a tightly integrated user provisioning and enterprise single sign-on offering that will give customers using Citrix Password Manager a seamless end-user access experience, fast time-to-value, strengthened security and a reduced administrative burden. Compatibility between Courion's AccountCourier enterprise user provisioning solution and Citrix Password Manager has been demonstrated through a rigorous testing program. As part of the agreement, Courion will recommend Citrix Password Manager to their current customers as well as prospects.

"From a project perspective, provisioning and password management go hand-in-hand; but sometimes enterprises have to deal with multiple products to get the job done" said Mike Neuenschwander, research director with the Burton Group. "The integration of Courion's provisioning product and Citrix's single sign-on technology helps customers accomplish both tasks more efficiently by streamlining administrative tasks. The combined technology also improves the access experience for users while increasing online security."

"One of the key issues in information access today is the growing demand by users for integration between user provisioning and enterprise single sign-on," said David Jones, corporate vice president, business development and corporate affairs, for Citrix . "We chose to partner with Courion because it is a leader in its industry and a pioneer in developing enterprise and self-service user provisioning technology. Availability of this integrated offering will enable Citrix's enterprise customers to enhance their access experience and achieve greater returns on their Citrix access platform investment. In addition, both solutions are designed to enable channel partners to deliver similar business benefits to small and mid-sized companies."

In response to an increasing market demand, Courion and Citrix are offering a tightly integrated user provisioning and enterprise single sign-on solution to their customer base. Customers leveraging the integrated Courion and Citrix offering will benefit from the following:

-- Seamless Access Experience for End Users. Users will have all their accounts automatically provisioned and registered with Citrix Password Manager. New users simply log-on once to their network domain and all SSO-enabled applications are automatically signed on and immediately available. This process improves and simplifies the user's experience and also boosts productivity levels by getting users connected to their applications faster, more reliably and with less effort.

-- Ease of Administration. As user accounts and entitlements are provisioned, no additional effort is required to provide credentials to users or manually set them up in the Citrix enterprise single sign-on solution and Courion's delegated provisioning capabilities provide an unprecedented degree of flexibility.

-- Increased Security. Because most credentials are administered from the back end, the user does not need to know the passwords associated with every account he is provisioned for - meaning more complex passwords can be automatically generated and are never written down.

-- Fast Time to Value. Users immediately benefit from single sign-on to all Windows, Web and host-based applications.

Citrix Password Manager provides a standards-based Servicing Provisioning Markup Language (SPML) interface to AccountCourier. Courion is one of the first partners to leverage Citrix's new user provisioning API. The integration also includes support for Citrix Hot Desktop and Citrix SmoothRoaming(TM). The Hot Desktop feature, developed for shared workstation environments enables users to logon/off in seconds and eliminate generic logon accounts. These shared workstation environments are commonly used in hospitals, banks, government, manufacturing and retail facilities. As users roam from one workstation/kiosk to another, SmoothRoaming ensures that applications are displayed in the exact state that the user left them, requiring only that the user reauthenticate.

"Over the past year we have seen a significant increase in demand from our customer base for a tightly integrated user provisioning and enterprise single sign-on solution. By partnering with Citrix Systems, we're combining leaders in our respective spaces and our shared vision of improving the end user's access experience," said Kurt Johnson, vice president of corporate development at Courion. "Courion is excited Citrix has chosen to work with us to enhance its enterprise single sign-on offering and we look forward to teaming with Citrix to increase customer satisfaction."

Courion and Citrix have been embarking on a nationwide "Secure by Design" tour to educate channel partners on the benefits of this integrated solution which is available through Courion and Citrix partner channel participants who have been certified to sell both solutions.

Courion will demonstrate the integrated solution at iForum Las Vegas, booth #707.