Radiant Logic, the market leader for virtual directory solutions, today announced the release of its groundbreaking new RadiantOne Virtual Directory Server (VDS) Context Edition 5.1.

With this release, Radiant Logic moves virtual directory technology beyond traditional directory aggregation into a data model-driven solution for complete identity integration and context management™. The VDS Context Edition meets the challenges of identity integration in increasingly heterogeneous environments, delivering next-generation innovation and game-changing context management capabilities.

"We see customers asking for a Virtual Directory that provides a unified and comprehensive view of all users across disparate data sources and the contextual assets tied to each," said Steve Lewis, identity management architect at Advanced Systems Engineering Corporation. "By linking this wealth of information and exposing it in a manner that applications can consume, within a security-enabled layer, we are able to successfully provide our customers with a rich and secure profile of their users and services."

With mergers and acquisitions at the highest rate in decades and IT budgets cut more than 20 percent over the last year, enterprises need to leverage existing systems and legacy applications to support business-driving modern architectures, such as SOA, SaaS, and the cloud. Within today's complex, heterogeneous environments, there is increasing demand for secure and scalable ways to integrate siloed data without disruption, costly and brittle hand-coding, or massive infrastructure investments.

VDS Context Edition is designed for high-volume, heterogeneous identity environments, with multiple user populations (customers, partners, employees) and disparate data sources (directories, databases, web services). By isolating applications from the complexity of backend sources, VDS Context Edition provides a single unified view of customers, enabling authentication, authorization, audit, and profile management for enterprise initiatives, such as Web Access Management, portal SSO, and federation.

According to Gartner in its presentation "Everything You Know About Identity Management Is Wrong," from November 2007, "To enable 'what you need is what you get' services, adaptive, contextual (virtual) identity will be the single most important piece of context." VDS Context Edition delivers on this promise by introducing "context management" for this next generation of identity services.

"With regulation getting a lot tougher, the trend is for access control to get more sophisticated, more finely grained than just the user and the role," said Felix Gaehtgens, Senior Analyst at Kuppinger Cole + Partner. "To make sophisticated decisions, more context is needed apart from the actual identity data. This context goes beyond what can typically be found in most identity stores, and will require new levels of abstraction."

New Features and Functionality

The VDS Context Edition features a completely new join engine, a sophisticated Context Builder, advanced caching options, and many other performance and scalability features.

Advanced Join Engine and Context Builder

With an innovative new join engine, the VDS Context Edition links objects across data silos, while the Context Builder exposes the semantic relationships between those objects as plain English sentences. RadiantOne's advanced context technology allows data from disparate systems to be connected and represented in contextually significant ways that are easily understood by both existing digital systems and humans.

Data Modeling and Metadata Handling

VDS Context Edition data modeling and advanced metadata handling enables administrators to publish customized hierarchical views out of heterogeneous data sources without being constrained by existing data structure-data is kept in context, and is searchable, secure, and easily updated. VDS unifies data sources into a common access point that can be leveraged as an LDAP server, web service, or SQL server.

Caching Options and Scalability

Advanced caching options mean the highest levels of availability and performance possible. Persistent cache is refreshed in real-time using RadiantOne's exclusive event-driven cache refresh system. VDS Context Edition is fully scalable and built for even the largest and most demanding of environments, thanks to the built-in failover, load balancing, and replication capabilities and the included RadiantOne Access Router.

"We built VDS Context Edition for companies that must adapt quickly, leveraging existing assets and managing a rising tide of mergers, acquisitions, and restructuring," said Michel Prompt, founder and CEO of Radiant Logic. "VDS Context Edition turns the toughest identity integration challenges, which have often been unsolvable, even with custom coding and complex configurations, into cost-effective, nondisruptive, risk-free deployments."

About Radiant Logic

Radiant Logic, Inc. is the market-leading provider of virtual directory solutions for identity management and enterprise information integration. The RadiantOne Identity and Context Virtualization Platform is being deployed by global enterprises to provide unified, secure access to identity and contextual views built out of heterogeneous applications and data sources. RadiantOne is a key enabler for authentication, authorization, profile, and personalization initiatives.

For more information, visit www.radiantlogic.com or download a 45-day free trial.