[announce] OASIS Member News- Communicator Inc Announces World's FirstInter-Enterprise Implementation of a Liberty Alliance-Enabled Digital IdentityManagement Service

[Serge Shinkar <serge.shinkar@cihub.com>]

January 27, 2003

Hub ID Delivers the First Multi-Company, Liberty Alliance-Enabled Circle 
of Trust with Federated Account Linking and Single Sign-On

Communicator Inc, the leading supplier of secure, managed electronic 
communications services to Fortune 1000 companies, today announced that 
Hub ID(TM) is the first to implement the Liberty Alliance's 
specification for federated network identity in an inter-enterprise 
environment. By being Liberty Alliance-enabled, Hub ID Communicator Inc 
has reduced the time for companies to join its secure gated communities 
from several months to just days. All current Hub ID customers are 
immediately Liberty Alliance-enabled because it is run as a managed 
service. SecuritiesHub, a consortium of many leading financial 
institutions, is using the Communicator Hub ID digital identity 
management service to link independent, affiliated Web sites with single 
sign-on.

"Hosted identity management services that implement the Liberty Alliance 
standards are an important factor in spurring broad adoption of 
federated security approaches," said James Kobielus, senior analyst with 
Burton Group. "Communicator Hub ID is one of the pioneering Liberty 
Alliance-based services on the market, supporting vertical-industry B2B 
offerings such as SecuritiesHub. Hub ID provides a fundamental security 
feature for e-business--Web single sign-on (SSO)--which spares users 
from having to log on multiple times as they browse between the separate 
Web sites of affiliated organizations. Communicator Inc provides more 
than just the technological infrastructure for secure e-business--it 
also provides an online trust environment within which its customers can 
securely link their business applications and serve common customers."

SecuritiesHub Liberty Alliance Enables 22,000 Financial Investors

SecuritiesHub, which is sponsored by eight leading Wall Street 
investment firms, including Credit Suisse First Boston, Goldman Sachs, 
JPMorgan, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Salomon Smith 
Barney and UBS Warburg, uses Hub ID to enable more than 22,000 
institutional customers to use a single user name and password to access 
proprietary bond research and trading information. Hub ID synchronizes 
the directories of each organization, matches the multiple identities of 
their common users and facilitates the exchange of encrypted security 
credentials between each company's Web site.

"We are always looking for ways to make SecuritiesHub more useful to our 
participants. That means growing the community over time. The Liberty 
Alliance specification enables us to do that more easily," said Miko 
Eda, president of SecuritiesHub. "What's more, because of how Hub ID is 
integrated with the individual enterprises, each company can now use the 
Liberty Alliance standard for its own purposes, even if that means 
linking with partners or suppliers outside of the current community."

Tracking Multiple Identities: A Growing Problem

As enterprises increasingly provide employees, customers, partners and 
suppliers access to confidential content and restricted applications 
through their Web sites and systems, enterprises must keep track of 
multiple user identities and users must keep track of multiple sets of 
login credentials. In response to this problem, a number of vendors have 
developed identity management and single sign-on applications. While 
most of these applications perform fine with a company's network, they 
are not well suited to inter-enterprise communications.

Hub ID, which is hosted and managed by Communicator Inc, enables 
enterprises to securely extend and manage their corporate identities 
across multiple enterprises. Based on a federated directory structure, 
which Communicator Inc pioneered in 1999, Hub ID enables enterprises to 
maintain autonomy and control of their authentication and authorization 
information while allowing end-users to move securely from one 
affiliated site to another using a single user name and password. 
Communicator Hub ID currently manages more than 300,000 identities 
across more than 2,500 companies worldwide.

"Building secure gated communities is about companies developing the 
right policies to work together to better serve their customers, 
partners and suppliers," said Serge Shinkar, product manager for 
Communicator Hub ID. "By Liberty Alliance-enabling Hub ID, we help 
companies come together faster so they can focus on business, rather 
than technology. As the only provider in the marketplace today offering 
identity management as a hosted service, we are able to give our 
customers the benefit of lower-cost, faster to market solutions that 
support standards to enable interoperability and ease-of-use."

The Liberty 1.1 specification complements the proprietary Cooked URL 
(CURL) technology Communicator developed to exchange digital 
credentials. Communicator has also enabled Hub ID with the Security 
Assertions Markup Language (SAML) specification to aid in the transfer 
of authorization credentials.

Commitment to Standards

Communicator Inc is a strong supporter of the emerging standards for 
identity management. The company is a sponsor member of the Liberty 
Alliance and is a member of the Organization for Advancement of 
Structured Information Standards (OASIS), the body that oversees the 
SAML specifications. Communicator Inc is closely monitoring development 
of the emerging Service Provisioning Markup Language (SPML) 
specification and plans to be an early adopter of SPML when it is released.

Hub ID provides a comprehensive set of identity related services, 
including single sign-on, account provisioning, self-help systems, 
permissioned white pages and presence awareness. Hub ID integrates with 
a wide variety of environments and enables companies to leverage their 
existing technology investments and architecture. Pricing for the base 
service begins at $50 per user, per year, with enterprise pricing 
available. For more information contact Communicator Inc at (914) 
872-2810, sales@communicatorinc.com, or www.communicatorinc.com/hubid.

About Communicator Inc

Communicator Inc provides a suite of software tools and secure, managed 
technology services that connect the right people to the right 
information in real-time, within and across organizations. The 
Communicator Hub identity management, content aggregation and messaging 
products help build strong relationships between companies and their 
core customers by improving efficiency, reducing costs and protecting 
client relationships, content and brands. Communicator Inc is a 
privately held company headquartered in White Plains, New York. For more 
information about Communicator Inc visit www.communicatorinc.com.

-- 
Serge Shinkar
Phone: 914-872-2784
serge.shinkar@cihub.com
Communicator Inc
360 Hamilton Avenue, 2nd Fl.
White Plains, NY  10601