SAN FRANCISCO — (July 9, 2003) Critical Path, Inc. (Nasdaq: CPTH), a global leader in identity management and messaging software and services, today announced its support for simplifying the deployment of Microsoft© Active Directory© in a wide range of enterprise environments. With Critical Path's identity management products, organizations can reduce the time, cost, and effort needed to migrate to Active Directory or seamlessly integrate it with existing infrastructure. This enables the same identity information — such as usernames, passwords, email addresses, contact information, and membership in groups — to be used for Windows services and for other applications or operating systems.
Critical Path™ Meta-Directory offers out-of-the-box connectivity to an industry-leading breadth of business systems. It enables Active Directory to be integrated with multi-vendor environments without the need for custom development or disruptive platform upgrades. The Critical Path software synchronizes information stored in different applications, directories, databases and operating systems with Active Directory. This allows Microsoft-based services and other applications to co-exist while ensuring that they all have consistent access to accurate, up-to-date identity information.
With Critical Path's software, organizations can use enterprise applications such as SAP HR to automatically provision account, group, and mailbox information in Active Directory. This allows access to key resources to be quickly granted — or revoked — based on changes in users' roles. Easy-to-configure business rules in the Critical Path software give organizations fine-grained control over what information is passed to Active Directory, ensuring that proper security and privacy policies are always followed.
"Many organizations are wrestling with how to deploy Active Directory on Windows 2003 or Windows 2000 without disrupting their existing infrastructure," said Bernard Harguindeguy, executive vice president and general manager of Critical Path's identity management business unit. "The Critical Path Meta-Directory enables large and small enterprises to address this crucial issue by seamlessly integrating their existing systems with Active Directory, reducing both implementation risk and cost."
Directory Migration and Co-Existence
The flexibility of the Critical Path Meta-Directory allows enterprises to easily migrate from one directory infrastructure to another or have multiple directories co-exist. Organizations that manage network login data in Novell NDS or web portal sign-on credentials in Sun ONE (formerly iPlanet) directories can use Critical Path's software to integrate the identity information and automatically keep Active Directory up to date. Unlike batch approaches that can leave data stale and lead to errors or security vulnerabilities, the Critical Path Meta-Directory dynamically synchronizes the Active Directory whenever entries change in the other directories. This avoids the need for user retraining and prevents expensive, time-consuming helpdesk calls.
Critical Path's Meta-Directory is unique in its breadth of built-in connectors for major business systems - including directories from the industry's major vendors; databases from Oracle, Sybase, and IBM; enterprise applications such as SAP HR, Lotus Notes, and Microsoft Exchange; as well as IBM RACF mainframe security and other operating system platforms. In addition, its support for industry-standard languages such as Java, Perl and XML provides easy extensibility and frees organizations from having to learn proprietary scripting languages in order to integrate their own applications and data. As a result, the Critical Path Meta-Directory allows identity management solutions to be deployed more rapidly with significantly lower upfront and ongoing costs.
About Critical Path, Inc.
Critical Path, Inc. (Nasdaq: CPTH) is a global leader in digital communications software and services. The company provides messaging solutions — from wireless, secure and unified messaging to basic email and personal information management — as well as identity management solutions that simplify user profile management and strengthen information security. The standards-based Critical Path Communications Platform, built to perform reliably at the scale of public networks, delivers the industry's lowest total cost of ownership for messaging solutions and lays a solid foundation for next-generation communications services. Solutions are available on a hosted or licensed basis. Critical Path's customers include more than 700 enterprises, 200 carriers and service providers, eight national postal authorities and 35 government agencies. Critical Path is headquartered in San Francisco. More information can be found at www.criticalpath.net.
Forward-Looking Statements:
This press release contains forward-looking statements by the Company and its executives regarding the performance, security, scalability and interoperability of our product and service offerings, the ability of our customers to achieve cost savings in the provision of services, industry trends, market and customer requirements, the ability of our products and services to meet the business needs of our customers, the market for products and services like ours and the performance of our senior management in achieving strategic goals. The words and expressions "look forward to," "will," "expect," "plan," "believe," "seek," "strive for," "anticipate," hope," "estimate" and similar expressions are intended to identify the Company's forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated. These risks include, but are not limited to, our evolving business strategy and the emerging and changing nature of the market for our products and services, our ability to deliver on our sales objectives, the ability of our technology and our competitors' technologies to address customer demands, changes in economic and market conditions, unplanned system interruptions and capacity constraints, software and service design defects. These and other risks and uncertainties are described in more detail in the Company's filings with the U.S Securities and Exchange Commission (www.sec.gov) made from time to time, including Critical Path's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2002,and Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the fiscal quarter ended March 31, 2003, as may be amended from time to time, and all subsequent filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (www.sec.gov). Note to Editors: Critical Path and the Critical Path logo are the trademarks of Critical Path, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their holders.
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For additional information, contact:
For Reporters:
Critical Path, Inc.
Jim Fulton
408.541.2524
jim.fulton@criticalpath.net For Investors:
Critical Path, Inc.
Mike Bishop
415.541.2619
mike.bishop@criticalpath.net
Ernst van der Ploeg
Regional Sales Director
for Critical Path BENELUX
+31 (0) 6 512 77060 phone
+31 (0) 6 105 48013 fax
A Global L ader in Digital Communications Software and Services