WSO2 wins KuppingerCole European Identity Award 2011

WSO2, the lean enterprise middleware company, yesterday announced that it has been awarded the European Identity Award 2011 in the Cloud Provider Offerings category by analyst group KuppingerCole.

The award recognises WSO2 for WSO2 Identity as a Service, citing the multi-tenant open source cloud service for its OpenID and XACML support and its innovative features, including the ability to migrate from on-premise to a full cloud service. This award was presented on 11 May at the European Identity Conference 2011 in Munich.

The European Identity Award honours outstanding projects and initiatives in identity management, highlighting implementations and programs that promote the awareness and business value of digital identity in the context of business and commerce. Winners have all distinguished themselves through exceptional efforts in identity and access management (IAM); governance, risk management and compliance (GRC); and cloud security.

“We are very honoured to receive KuppingerCole’s European Identity Award 2011 in the Cloud Provider Offerings category,” said Paul Fremantle, WSO2 co-founder and CTO. “We created our WSO2 Identity as a Service to address the big challenges for identity and access control faced by enterprises as they start to use cloud services like Salesforce and Google Apps. The recognition by one of Europe’s leading research firms further validates our vision that standards-based, policy-based identity in the cloud is vital to the success of the cloud.”

WSO2 Identity as a Service helps companies eliminate the complexity of deploying identity management and authentication across multiple software as a service (SaaS) applications, as well as internal and traditional systems.

By supporting a broad set of authentication and security standards — including SAML2, XACML, OpenId and OAuth — WSO2 Identity as a Service gives administrators a central identity management system while users gain single sign-on access to different cloud applications. The use of standards means that the WSO2 offering works out-of-the-box with major Web systems, such as Tomcat, Liferay and Drupal, as well as major cloud providers, such as Google Apps and Salesforce.

Available both as cloud-enabled application platform (CEAP) software and a hosted platform as a service (PaaS), WSO2 Identity as a Service uniquely offers the flexibility to deploy on — and easily migrate between — on-premise servers, private clouds, public clouds, and hybrid environments. WSO2 Identity as a Service is designed to support millions of users, and its ability to automatically scale across as many server instances as required ensures high availability, performance and reliability whether on-premise or in the cloud.

KuppingerCole, founded in 2004, is a leading Europe-based analyst company for identity focused information security, both in classical and in cloud environments. KuppingerCole stands for expertise, thought leadership, and a vendor-neutral view on these information security market segments, covering all relevant aspects like Identity and Access Management (IAM), Governance, Risk Management and Compliance (GRC), IT Risk Management, Authentication and Authorisation, Single Sign-On, Federation, User Centric Identity Management, eID cards, Cloud Security and Management, and Virtualisation.

KuppingerCole stands for thought leadership in and a deep knowledge of all covered market segments. It supports you in mitigating your risks when making decisions.

WSO2 is the lean enterprise middleware company. It delivers the only complete open source enterprise SOA middleware stack purpose-built as an integrated platform to support today’s heterogeneous enterprise environments — internally and in the cloud. WSO2’s service and support team is led by technical experts who have proven success in deploying enterprise SOAs and contribute to the technology standards that enable them.