2 July 2007

VW to save £35m with global access management as SAP enters market

Ian Grant, Computer Weekly

Volkswagen expects to save more than £35m by switching to an identity management system that will allow it to control how staff and business partners access its network, applications and data.

The Access and Identity Management system from BMC will give every VW employee and thousands of external business partners, such as design engineers and car dealers, a unique identity on the German car maker's IT infrastructure, based on their job role.

Hans-Ottmar Beckmann, chief information security officer at VW, said the system would save the equivalent of £33,000 per application through simplified administration. "We have thousands of applications. Now that we have centralised these functions, administration is much cheaper and simpler," he said.

The system paid for itself when VW brought its 100th application under the BMC identity management regime, said Beckmann.

He added that from having to define precisely who had access to which applications, the company discovered it was 15% overstocked with SAP licences, allowing it to negotiate more favourable terms.

So far, VW has added 650,000 individuals to the system, which is about three-quarters of the expected total.

"We are still keeping our other identity management systems, such as RAC-F for the staff who work on the IBM mainframes, but access to them is through the BMC system," said Beckmann.

He said the project grew massively as VW started understanding and responding to the implications of allowing identity-based access to its internal systems.

In particular, the company realised that it needed clean, verified data. To this end, it set up a separate section in the human resources department that is dedicated to checking employee data, especially for new hires and outsourced skills.

"This is very important when you are allowing external engineers to access your designs and knowledge, or sending immobiliser codes to China, for instance," said Beckmann.

* SAP is entering the identity management market. The pricing on a suite of programmes is currently being finalised.

David Keene, SAP's chief technical officer, said the new suite will be announced shortly. It is being tested by clients in the airline and manufacturing industries and by the public sector.

Keene said SAP's move into the identity management market is driven by clients who are feeling pressure from regulatory authorities to tighten what he called their GRC (governance, risk and compliance) performance.

The suite allows customers to authenticate users, permit them secure access to information assets more easily, and to monitor their activities in the underlying applications. The suite will be available as a separate product as well as part of SAP's ERP and SOA offerings.

The suite is the result of SAP's recent purchase of Maxware and Outlooksoft. Keene said the Maxware elements use identity-related information such as name and permissions from existing underlying SAP and non-SAP applications such as sales-order entry or purchasing so that the company can apply it quickly and easily to other applications.

The Outlook Soft programs allow the company to monitor the users' activity on the underlying systems.

These articles first appeared on the web-site of Computer Weekly, at http://www.computerweekly.com//Articles/2007/07/02/225262/vw-to-save-35m-with-global-access-management.htm and http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2007/06/27/225112/sap-enters-id-management-sector.htm. © Reed Business Information 2007.

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