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Convergint signs on with Imprivata

Convergint signs on with Imprivata

SCHAUMBURG, Ill.--In mid-April, Imprivata began rolling out its trainers to the 18 U.S. and Canadian sales offices of Convergint Technologies, following an announcement at ISC West that the two companies had entered into a partnership whereby Convergint will bring to market Imprivata's OneSign Physical | Logical converged security access platforms. The technology allows Convergint to offer a merged physical and network access control system, and allows Convergint to add logical access to systems that already have physical access control through Lenel, Software House, S2 and a few other companies. Convergint is a Lenel partner, as well. "We've been fairly aggressive on the whole IP and convergence side of the market," said Dan Moceri, Convergint chief executive officer and co-founder. "We see this as the next logical step for the industry." Moceri described a similar partnership with Lenel and ActivIdentity that Convergint has been working on, targeting a higher-end market looking for the same solution. He said Imprivata's single sign-on appliance concept is clean, "looks to be simple to implement," and initially seems to make sense particularly for health care and industrial applications. Essentially, an employee's identity can be managed through a single appliance, with privileges for any network admittance or physical location admittance controlled through one administrative location. For instance, with mobile PCs more popular in hospitals, "they have to have a way to secure those logically and physically," said Moceri. In the industrial market, "where you've got a lot of people coming and going," the Imprivata solution paired with access control from Lenel can be "a method to simplify this whole process" of human resource management. Imprivata senior vice president for business development and marketing Geoff Hogan said the company is being selective in its addition of integrator partners, and Convergint "has made it a focus of their business to increasingly integrate and converge security and access systems." Now that Imprivata has made a commitment to converging, Hogan said, "our whole objective is that we want to envelope them in the most positive way so they know all the resources at Imprivata are there to support them." The company offers marketing support, technical training, and a network of IT resellers "if there's a need to get them involved in a joint opportunity." Does Moceri see this single sign-on application leading to end users asking Convergint for more IT security support, such as against phishing attacks or viruses? "No," he said. "There's a natural division. When you talk about security, it's all about 'access to.' All those other things get into other realms with different sets of expertise. With ours, it's more focused on that physical/logical access to assets. Will it potentially all come together? Maybe. But we have not seen that yet."

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