IBM today announced enhancements to its directory portfolio, enabling customers to integrate and manage identity data across the enterprise, which can enhance overall operational efficiency and security.

As an integral part of IBM's business integration strategy, these offerings provide customers with a strong directory foundation to deploy security and Web services architectures and extend their business processes to include customers, business partners and suppliers. The IBM Directory portfolio, which includes IBM Directory Server 5.1 and IBM Directory Integrator 5.1, provides a robust, scalable directory infrastructure that can integrate across multiple datastores on different computing platforms.

Analysts recognize IBM among the leaders in business integration, including directory technology. In addition, based on vision and relevant technology, Burton Group cited IBM as the industry leader in the emerging Enterprise Data Network space in a recent report entitled "Beyond Application Integration, Concepts and Functions of the Enterprise Data Network" by Mike Neuenschwander.

"Data networks expose data objects as addressable resources on the network, independent of application and procedural interfaces," says Mike Neuenschwander, senior analyst with Burton Group. "Web services infrastructure today is designed for sharing procedural --not data-- resources, but data networking is the next phase of Web services build out. IBM Directory Integrator is a key component of IBM's foray into data networking."

Directory Server 5.1 is the foundation for deploying comprehensive identity management applications and advanced web architectures like Web services. It is built on IBM's award-winning DB2 technology, uses the industry standard Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) identity infrastructure and offers a reliable, scalable, standards-based platform that can interoperate with a broad range of operating systems and applications. IBM Directory Server 5.1 offers improved security, performance, and advanced replication capabilities as well as continued improvements in administration.

Directory Integrator, is an open-architecture, metadirectory solution for synchronizing and exchanging information between directory and database sources to provide a consistent, enterprise-level view of a company's identity information without requiring a centralized database. IBM Directory Integrator 5.1 includes enhancements in the configuration storage architecture, management capabilities, user interface and communications capabilities.