SAN FRANCISCO — (August 7, 2002) Critical Path, Inc. (Nasdaq: CPTH), a global leader in Internet communications, announced today that its directory and meta-directory technology has been selected by Kaiser Permanente, America's leading integrated health care organization, to provide a crucial foundation for advanced automated provisioning and security applications, including single sign-on, public key infrastructure (PKI) support, and access control. This initiative reflects Kaiser Permanente's commitment to developing a comprehensive identity management framework that provides integrated, dependable information across the enterprise, reduces organizational complexity and redundancy, and assists Kaiser Permanente in complying with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996.
Today, Kaiser Permanente maintains extensive data used in numerous clinical and business applications. The CP™ Directory Server and the CP™ Meta Directory Server will provide a scalable, fault-tolerant coordination point to ensure that consistent, accurate data can be accessed by multiple applications.
The largest nonprofit integrated health maintenance organization in the United States, representing 100,000 employees and more than eight million members, Kaiser Permanente has chosen Critical Path to provide directory software, as well as X.500/LDAP compatible enterprise meta-directory, and PKI-compatible functionality integral to creating a new identity management infrastructure. The driving forces behind Kaiser's project are cost reduction and compliance with HIPAA, a health care reform initiative enacted to add a dimension of portability to workers' health insurance as they transition between states of employment. HIPAA contains important privacy provisions that apply to health information created or maintained by health care providers who engage in certain electronic transactions, such as providing health plans or acting as a clearinghouse for health care information.
"Kaiser Permanente is at the forefront of organizations relying on our directory and meta-directory to control access to vital information," said William McGlashan, Jr., chairman and chief executive officer at Critical Path. "Given the stakes involved, failure is not an option for Kaiser Permanente, and we're excited that our technology will provide a vital foundation for helping Kaiser ensure the confidentiality of highly sensitive and personal information."
The Critical Path solution will help Kaiser Permanente establish HIPAA compliance by providing an infrastructure component for access control that permits only authorized individuals to access certain types of highly confidential information such as patient medical records. For example, Kaiser may assign a physician role-based access to medical records, but limit the access of administrative office staff only to claims information.
CP Directory Server
The CP Directory enables organizations to handle rapid growth by more easily distributing and managing user profiles and security credentials across many different locations. In addition, it offers enhanced directory schema management that simplifies the integration with third-party security solutions, such as single sign-on and public key infrastructure.
CP Meta-Directory Server
CP Meta-Directory Server makes it much easier for organizations to integrate legacy data systems and establish policies and business processes for automatically distributing identity data. It is unique in its breadth of pre-built connectors and its support for industry-standard languages such as Java, Perl, XML and DSML for connecting to applications and data sources. This standards-based architecture frees organizations such as Kaiser Permanente from having to learn proprietary scripting languages, enabling them to leverage standard APIs to deploy identity management solutions more rapidly, thereby significantly lowering both upfront and ongoing costs.
About Critical Path, Inc.
Critical Path, Inc. (Nasdaq: CPTH) delivers software and services that maximize the value of Internet communications. The company provides messaging and collaboration 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. Critical Path's customers include more than 700 enterprises, 190 carriers and service providers, eight national postal authorities and 35 government agencies. Critical Path is headquartered in San Francisco with offices throughout North America, Europe, Asia and Latin America. More information on Critical Path can be found at www.cp.net.
Forward-Looking Statements:
This press release contains forward-looking statements by the Company and its executives regarding endorsements of our product and service offerings by our customers and partners, the performance, scalability and interoperability of our product and service offerings, industry trends, market and customer requirements and the ability of our products and services to meet the business needs of our customers, and the market for products and services like ours. The words and expressions "look forward to," "will," "expect," "plan," "believe," "seek," "strive for," "anticipate," "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, 2001, and the Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 30, 2002, as may be amended from time to time.
NOTE: Company names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.
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For additional information, contact:
For Reporters:
Michelle Cox
Horn Group, Inc.
415.905.4039
mcox@horngroup.com For Investors:
Mike Bishop
Critical Path, Inc.
415.541.2619
mike.bishop@cp.net
Ernst van der Ploeg
Regional Sales Director
For Critical Path Netherlands
+31 (0) 6 51 77060 phone
+31 (0) 6 105 48013 fax
A Global Leader in Internet Communications