Well, the time between the years (usually today referring to the days after Christmas until New Years Eve – but did you know these were historically the twelve days between December 24th and January 6th which served to align lunar and solar calender years? But I am getting too much off-topic…) is used to reflect about the year passed. There are a few things and events that absolutely impressed me in 2011, which I like to talk about a litte!
First, there was the spring event European Identity Conference (EIC – www.id-conf.com) which had a great impact from my personal point of view. I never had so many interviews, briefings, talks and sessions to host in that short amount of time. But instead of feeling exhausted and depleted when finally traveling home that Friday, I felt energized, motivated and inspired! So many interesting people to talk to, so many vibrant sessions and panel discussions to follow – and a really delicious catering all the time!
Second, the autumn event IT Security Area (www.it-sa.de) in Nuremberg. A tradefair by design, it was also packed with a decent conference framework programme and the three official stages in the exhibition area had a rather impressive set of security speakers such as Prof. Taher el-Gamal, Martin Schallbruch of the State Department or Horst Flätgen of Federal Office of IT Security. Though spanning a much larger scope than EIC, Identity Management and Privacy Protecting Technologies were key topics discussed.
Finally, there was one vendor event which really impressed me a lot. Being a former CA, Microsoft and Siemens employee, I do know what large corporations are able to pull off regarding trade-fairs and exhibitions as well as “in-house events”. But comparing a Microsoft booth at Cebit, a CA InExchange or similar events just did not do well. Ok, Microsoft TechEd, SAP SAPPHIRE and CA World are all a close call. But Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco this year was by far the most exciting and entertaining event!
Let me give you a little impression of the breadth of topics that I (as an Identity, Privacy & Security Analyst) was confronted with:
- Big Data
- Cloud Services
- Database Management (doh!)
- Secure Programming Guides and Secure Development Programmes
- Hardware and the opportunities of full HW/MW/SW Stacks (see? I did not use “advantage”!)
- Bring Your Own Device (yeah, many Oracle people had personal “i”-devices with them!)
and many more!
Ok, the topics I can really give an insight on where the following:
It really looks like Oracle assimilated the Sun Hardware Business – the racks could be seen all over the space in San Francisco at Oracle Open World. Of more interest to me, was how they would present their integration efforts in the IAM space, as they had also acquired a large amount of Intellectual Properties and code around role-mining and attestation from SUN.
Sadly, they did not really make that a topic but continued to refer to their „suite“, which from my point of view still lacks some deep-end integration regarding the OIA (Oracle Identity Analytics). At least it looks like the 12g releases will deliver on that. I meet with some happy customers though, who had deployed this „component“ of the suite and they were all boasting how easy it was to setup and how they could impress their management with quick-wins. Well, that was always „inside“ the products core, which I had the honor to work with during previous engagements. What I felt was missing a bit, is to stress the actual „power of the suite“: if you deploy OIA for analysis and re-certification (attestation), it is (or at least should be) a natural choice to have that co-deployed with OIM and get all the changes delivered automatically. There is Integration, and Oracle worked a lot on that behind the scenes. But there is still some way to go, for example by having one workflow system instead of two for OIA and OIM – again something that is said to become available with 12g.
Another point that needs to be addressed with the suite offering is a much more customer centric approach of visualizing which component can help with which problem – a simple mapping would suffice! That would also help their field engineers and pre-sales staff which sometimes appear a little uncertain about which component to use when and about the dependencies of components.
So, it is nice to hear about deeper integration of the Fusion middleware component areas and how they work to together to make our life more enjoyable, but having some clear communication about “what fits where” in the IAM arena alone would help them a lot. Once the components (and please do not rename them again) went through that “matchmaking” from a marketing/sales perspective, everyone could better draw the lines and delimit what functionality comes with which component and how to combine elements to receive the expected functionality.
The last issue about selling an IAM suite I was curious about still remains unsolved: what to do if customers already have some components in place and will not want to migrate those? Selling a suite into a large organization may be like dumping a large black monolith into their IT. Having the components sharply delimited but at the same time tightly integrated is a key requirement for the vendor to successfully sell the suite. Keeping open interfaces and providing the customer the freedom of choice for selecting a competitive component for – let us say provisioning – is a key for customer success with their IT-landscape integration. While these goals seem to be contradictive at first, they become the same if you live up to your own pledge to support open and well documented standards and interfaces. As soon as all components of a suite support the same set of standards and interfaces, they are clearly delimited (hopefully) and can be mixed and combined to better match the actual requirements customers have. The big black monolith referred to above, then converts into a nice set up easy-to-connect Lego® bricks that enable customers to build their own suite. Given that the Oracle IAM suite in fact consists of many building blocks and that Oracle has a clear vision for (and is delivering on) a service-oriented approach to consume IAM services – the Oracle Service Oriented Security – they are well positioned to tell a much stronger story here than they sometimes do.
The real Cloud – now available at Oracle (and only there!?)
According to the first entertaining minutes of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison´s keynote at Oracle Open World, Oracle is now the only vendor to offer a real cloud – whatever that is supposed to mean. At least Hasan Rivzi elaborated a little more of the details how to register, pick services, select the payment plan (!) and then get the service created and defined. I am so happy about that update, as Larry rather concentrated on bashing that certain other Cloud vendor, whose CEO-keynote had been “postponed” the day before. At least in Germany, bashing the Co-Opetition is not considered good business conduct. At least not if you continue to brag over 90 minutes how much their services are inferior to your own (which have not even materialized yet). Well, as mentioned, Hasan explained in more detail how PaaS and IaaS offerings will be shaped and differentiated from the competition. A big focus will be on Java-based offerings, but my main points of interest were that key things like “Complete Isolation” of the different environments, SSO for the applications created, Centralized User Management with Delegated Administration for all of the above as well as Identity Federation between internal and Cloud Applications. That will be accompanied by “caging” resources and dedicated virtual machines per client, to keep the customers more secluded and to avoid “leaking” of data between environments. Another nice point to add: Data Integration is supposed to make moving data to the Cloud and back from the Cloud to your internal apps easier. Still unclear how that will actually work out, though.
Wrapping up:
I will return this year to see how the Suite approach was refined and how my (and some highly respected analyst folks) advice was used to push the capabilities of existing modules!

My colleague Jörg Resch just gave us a summary on the current status of new EU Privacy Regulation that is “in the works” in Brussels. If only a portion of this becomes “EU Law” – meaning that it will not be a Directive which needs to be translated into local national law but supersedes any existing national law – it will change the game in an instance. Not only would the “amusingly small” fines that could currently be imposed e.g. German companies for breaking privacy laws (standard maximum fine 50.000 €) be bumped up to “significant” numbers, but the actual provider of a service could be held liable for not protecting the data of his customer (or his customers´ customer, that is). Currently, if your company uses any kind of (IT) service and your customer data is disclosed by errors or omissions on behalf of the Service Provider, still your company will be sued and needs to pay the fine as you did not execute proper Governance in your contract with the Service Provider (hence I´ve been promoting the need for good information security governance paragraphs in each outsourcing contract!). In other words: although your Service Provider failed to deliver secure services and neglected his responsibility to provide the high quality and security that you expected from a professional vendor, you are being held accountable for the improper action that lead to the disclosure.
Looks like this is going to be changed! Or at least, the EU will try to change it…Behold of the Lobbyists!

Sometimes fate has it, that two corresponding subjects are discussed in parallel – as I talked to my old friend Peter Schoo of recently formed Fraunhofer AISEC in Munich-Garching. Just before I received Jörg´s summary on the progress of EU Privacy Law, I discussed with Peter what has been happening regarding Privacy Protection and Anonymity in the market. Recently, my point of view on gathering “customer information” and the process of storing this information to create a “customer profile” has changed dramatically. Besides the fact that this more or less in contradiction to Germanys´ data protection laws (referring to “Daten-Sparsamkeit” here), marketing experts always constructed some sort of “need” to justify this compilation. Especially the “REWE incident” where thousands of customer home addresses and other personal information was ripped from a marketing driven exchange platform (through this site, kids could swap the stickers they harvested with each of Moms shopping trips to REWE stores) made me feel like having this data had become more of a liability/risk than creating benefit/opportunity.
This is where Peters´ newest creation comes into play – his team created a tool called “Prividor” which stands for “Privacy Violation Detector”. It basically spiders a website and checks for any issues with data protection and privacy legislation that this site or portal may have. As some consumers are beginning to revert to a more strict handling of personal information, those “concerned users” would definitely feel more comfortable browsing for “special information” on sites that respect the privacy of a user. Especially government-owned sites or information portals that handle sensitive topics such as cancer, HIV infection or even “erectile dysfunction” would benefit largely. Imagine the user browsing for these things and receiving even more “blue pill” advertisements than usual or getting sponsored ads for cancer treatment on the next portal you visit – not what you fancy if you are really struck by that health condition!
Well, people with extensive Facebook (or name your favorite social network here) usage will probably not even think about such things, but a growing number of “concerned users” will. Now take into account what the EU seems to be aiming at and – voilà – demand for a “privacy protecting web-design” of any kind will rise instantly.
As I said, sometimes fate “makes may day”

Looking forward to your feedback, dear readers!
Oh, and here are the links, for the curious ones…

http://www.aisec.fraunhofer.de/en/fields-of-expertise/projects/prividor.html

http://prividor.eu/

The recently published document on protecting credit card data during processing and storage with tokenization technology has gathered quite a bit of response (see for yourself http://usa.visa.com/download/merchants/tokenization_best_practices.pdf). As others like Mr. McMillon of RSA said before (http://www.rsa.com/blog/blog_entry.aspx?id=1687), it is an overall good approach – and my very recent experience with CC data processing in outsourcing environments proves to me that solutions for this are in great demand. Besides the “nit-picking” (please excuse, we are totally on the same page here!) about calling encrypted CC data a “token” (which it is NOT…), there are some issues about the general approach shown by VISA. First, it is absolutely positive to see any progress and innovation around securing payment methods and payment processing, either at the PoS or online (and there are nice solutions for both environments readily available in the market, such as nuBridges offering, for example). Second, it is advisable to contribute to standardization and commonly accepted methods – isn´t it? Well, it looks like VISA – with all due respect for their effort to make this world a safer place! – has failed to get broad 3rd party support (such as e.g. funnelling this through the PCS DSS commitees or having it openly reviewed by experts) . It remains a mystery (at least to me) why VISA chose to spearhead this alone. The overall feedback received from experts around the world is a mixed bag of “well thought, but has major weaknesses”.
Thus, it is definitely worth a look if you have a need for securing CC data in your systems and guidance is needed on how to define certain aspects. On the other hand, it is advisable to compare the VISA best practices with what the “other” stakeholders such as Mastercard, Diners, Amex and the like may add or edit. From my personal perspective I applaud the advances made by this project but I clearly dislike the fact, that VISA did this on their own, effectively putting an extra burden on banks, merchants and all others dealing with CC data to harmonize with deviating requirements that may be published by other companies. I sincerely hope that the payment card industry does not fall into a “deny-all” mode but instead that a revised version with support from industry organizations such a the PCI DSS council is made public any time soon. Until then, I recommend reading, understanding and cross-checking the VISA best practices for tokenization with the extensive feedback already available from industry experts around the globe. The time for protecting CC data and other PII is definitely NOW, and good tokenization can help to reduce the leakage of such information!

Just recently my Strong Authentication report has been published and now there is one vendor less in the scope: French-American card and token giant GEMALTO announced that it acquired the niche player TODOS:

http://www.todos.se/index.php/media/archives/gemalto_acquires_e-banking_specialist_todos_ab/

Todos has some very interesting tokens, but I am pretty sure that Gemalto was just after the Todos´IP around online-banking security. Unknown to most of the world, it is Todos (or now Gemalto) that owns the technology that secure online banking solutions are based upon. Hopefully, Gemalto does not mess up those solutions too (remember the Debit/Credit Card frenzy that broke loose when the Gemalto chips on many German cards failed to operate after 2010 “suddenly came around the corner” and cards were not able to work with the date input?). Being a victim of this bug myself, I strongly hope the product scope and expertise of Todos will remain with Gemalto – I have deep respect for the achievements of the Swedish experts!!!

Coming from a network security background, for me “IPSec 3DES VPNs” seemed to be the solution for secure data transfer between business partners for quite a long time. Over the years, with more experience, I naturally found out that this was not the solution for all use-cases and scenarios these crazy folks called “customers” came up with. Nonetheless, when SSL-VPNs became en-vogue I hesitated to join the choir of supporters. While I fully understand and support the idea of a more flexible, more application or user-centric approach due to the gain in usability, I still love my “old VPN client” when connecting to the company resources.

During the last 13 month two projects kept me busy, that changed my personal perception of what one may need to be happy regarding secure access to resources and secure file transfer. One of those is largely related to “Cloud Computing” as such, and using//processing company data which is not stored inside my brick + mortar, perimeter secured, firewall protected company server but somewhere in the “internet”. Making sure only the right person with the right credential accesses this data makes me want to use strong authentication, but few of the Cloud service providers do offer such an additional layer of protection.

The other project was based on very Information Society 1.0 processes – the need to secure and protect the personal subscriber information of periodicals and daily newspapers that are exchanged between the publisher and the logistic service provider who manages the delivery of above mentioned print products – even if the subscriber is on vacation in Spain or recently moved to new address. These transfers are conducted between separate systems, distributed all over Europe. As most of these application systems are build individually, no real data standard is established. As the number of parties involved is high and participants change frequently, classic VPNs are out of question (and possibly “too expensive”). Thus, the need to protect data transfer (yes, it is based on FTP!!!) is obvious. Well, have you ever tried to create a solution that acts both as a server AND a client and supports FTP, sFTP, FTPS and other cryptic siblings of the FTP protocol? No? Well, you should not!

The “cure”?
Being a big fan of hardware, a.k.a. token-based, strong authentication mechanisms, vendors of non-hardware based mechanisms usually have a hard time convincing me that it is worthwhile paying attention to their product briefings. MultiFactors´ Garret Grajek was one of those CTOs whom I was giving a hard time until I finally arranged an appointment for a briefing. What can I say? The approach to using soft-certificates as second factor for authentication and the combination with out-of-band (a.k.a. SMS based) messaging during registration of a computer/session did impress me – because it was so simple and straight-forward! Especially for me, who uses multiple devices in parallel to access e.g. my mail, registering my personal computer at home or my clients´ laptop in the customer network to access Outlook Web Access this really did the trick. Ok, the downside is, I still need to log-in with my AD credentials – but this is something I criticized with Entrusts´ GRID authentication scheme, also (which I love, because it is such a low prized alternative to OTP tokens). Back to my project experience with outsourcing and “Cloud Services”, MultiFactor now has launched a nice extension which makes this approach available for use with services such as SalesForce.com and GoogleApps by leveraging federation technology. Now, I have to admit, this is something one can hardly achieve by using their own smartcard or token based authentication technology – especially not if one frequently changes the machine used. I guess if this approach can be tied into an Authentication Strategy and could possibly be supported by one of the Versatile Authentication Platform solutions, I could be a full supporter of these ominous “soft-tokens”.

Still, this does not help directly with my friends´ subscriber data, that needs to be updated daily. Fortunately, last Friday I had a briefing with nuBridges, a vendor of data protection tools that target both data at rest and data in motion. For the data at rest part, tokenization, scrambling and obfuscation of data – especially sensitive information such as credit card information – can be altered and stored in such ways that unique identification is still possible but leaked data would essentially be worthless. I won´t go into too much detail on this, but my experience with outsourcing and out-tasking applications that also handle payment transactions tells that there is some need for this. I was by far more interested in their secure data transfer solution, called nuBridges Exchange. Again, without going into too much technical detail, this solution provides a nice standard-of-the-shelf product to securely handle multiple parties exchanging large quantities of files in a secure way. Besides support for all varieties of secure data file transfer protocols, the most important fact is the streaming capability of the solution. The files in transfer are not stored on the receiving end of the transfer connection but rather streamed onwards to a protected internal storage system. As the receiving server sits in-between two firewalls and the “inbound streaming” transmission through the internal firewall is initiated by the control server inside the secured area, no open ports need to be put into the internal firewall system. As time for a first briefing usually is insufficient to go into much detail, I was unable to investigate the architecture and implementation further, but both management interface, report dashboard and the availability of a self-service portal for the business partners made a rather good overall impression. I am looking forward to further investigate these solutions and for sure will take a closer look at their Exchange Network service, also – especially as protecting credit card data at the point-of-sales and between PoS and central merchant systems seems to be attracting the attention of auditors lately.

What do you think about protecting data transfer and authentication/authorization strategies in a Cloud-environment? Let me know!

I guess it became unpopular to read printed news in some societies but I really enjoy reading WELT KOMPAKT, a smaller printed formfactor of well-known daily WELT. Today, the more or less entertaining “Internet” section had a lead article called “Safe in the Web 2.0″ or “Sicher im Web 2.0″ by author Peter Zschunke. Eager to learn more about how “the general public” is informed about the dangers that lurk in the web, I read the mid-size article, featuring a James Bond-like shot of what seems to be Security Ops Center. My interest turned into surprise, ending in a sort of rage when I finished the article.
It takes quite some time and effort to make me angry, but I instantly – for the first time in my life – wrote a letter to the author and the editors, and went like this:
Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren, sehr geehrter Herr Zschunke!

Ich habe anfangs mit Interesse, später mit zunehmender Verwunderung das gelesen, was die Welt Kompakt als redaktionellen Beitrag in der Internet Rubrik hat drucken lassen. Für mich klingt diese doch sehr einseitige, leider wenig von journalistischer Qualität sprechende Berichterstattung eher nach Advertorial, denn nach guter Recherche und umfassender Information. Dem Format und dem Umfang sei geschuldet, dass hier nur ein Bruchteil der Problematik von Datensicherheit und Datenschutz im Web 2.0 beleuchtet werden kann – aber dann ernsthaft dem Leser zu vermitteln, die Firma RSA hätte „die Lösung im Schrank“ und könne diese Probleme quasi „wegzaubern“ wenn sich die sozialen Netzwerker denn endlich mal aus dem Sessel bequemen würden? Das halte ich nicht nur für inkorrekt, ich halte es für gefährlich! Zumal „RSA“ nun wirklich nicht das Produkt sondern der Firmenname ist und Sie, wie ich annehme, eigentlich von einer Kombination der enVision Produktlinie mit anderen Werkzeugen sprechen. Zumindest die Nennung einiger vergleichbarer Technologien oder Anbieter wie Novell, ArcSight, CA etc. hätte der Neutralität gut getan… Die Produkte und Lösungen der RSA sind sicher anerkannt und wirkungsvoll – sowohl bei der Analyse von (Fehl-)Verhalten als auch beim Zugriffsschutz und der Verschlüsselung. Aber, um es sinngemäß mit den Worten von Bruce Schneier zu sagen:
„Wer denkt, dass Technologie seine Probleme lösen kann, der hat weder die Technologie noch die Probleme verstanden.“

Das Problem mit der sehr einseitigen Berichterstattung bleibt – es gilt eher am Konzept der sozialen Netzwerke, ihrer Datensammlung und Datenverwaltung zu arbeiten und den Anwender besser aufzuklären. Meiner Meinung nach steht Ihr Artikel der Aufklärung der Anwender eher im Weg, da hier ohne Sinn nach Technologie verlangt wird obwohl der eigene Menschenverstand ein viel besseres Mittel zum Schutz vor Missbrauch wäre. Bei mir hinterlässt dieser Artikel einen sehr faden Beigeschmack.

There is nothing wrong with a good advertorial or product related story, but this was so blatently single-sided, I just could not resist! I would love to discuss this with alll of you – feel free to comment, mail or call me!

#SAPTechEd – SAP Netweaver & GRC Identity Management
During the last 30 month I was rather critical towards SAP´s approach on how to position and further develop the technology acquired from Norwegian MaXware in 2007. The visit to SAP TechEd 2009 in Vienna showed through several technical presentations and direct interviews with people such as Keith Grayson, that SAP did a really job in not only integrating MaXware into the Netweaver group but also coming up with a sound strategy on how to move forward with whole offering. Besides the fact that Business Objects GRC systems still has some valuable functionality as provisioning tool for complex environments, the capabilities regarding the “Netweaver to SAP application” provisioning can now safely be called “unparalled” in the market. If you have access to the SDN platform, make sure to get your hands on the numerous slides in the SIMxyz track of TechEd. You can learn how to easily implement SAP Netweaver Identity Management, integrate with SAP Business Objects GRC and much more. As pointed out above, the joint deployment of the “standard provisioning engine” and the GRC one does have some benefits, especially if the Compliant User Provisioning (CUP) features are needed due to strong GRC requirements. It has been stressed in the sessions, that such a design needs to be planned very carefully and that cross-competence teams should be in charge of this to get all requirements and stakeholders represented in the final architecture.
Regarding 3rd party system integration, the ongoing standardization plays into SAPs hands, as Keith and I discussed the growing relevance of SPML and SAML 2.0, which, by the way, has now been tested and certified to be working with SAP ID management solutions and might find its way into the core product in the future. More and more provisioning targets become easier to integrate, as the corresponding ISVs now see openness towards IAM solution as a benefit.
To sum the impressions up: Keith and all the others did a great job in “turning around a skeptical analyst”. I am positive, that the current setup and strategy will result in a good position in the ever changing Enterprise Identity Management market for SAP.

I already pointed out my personal satisfaction about the recently announced cooperation between SAP and Novell in the GRC market. This morning I had the opportunity to discuss the whole approach with Jay Roxe of Novell and Ranga Bodla of the SAP GRC group, operating both out of the US.
Besides my enthusiasm about the materialization of something I suggested to be beneficial (every once in a while, analysts DO show that they are humans, too!), the discussion of business opportunities, market pull and demand for GRC in general were almost identical between the three of us.
First let´s check the market pull: both companies said they received multiple requests by existing customers to provide insight on how to couple the more business-GRC oriented SAP solutions and the more IT-GRC oriented SIEM tool Sentinel of Novell. As open APIs were already available and Novell had their products on the path to SAP certification, taking the next step and analyzing the related business opportunity was only a matter of weeks. The joint approach beyond using and testing the APIs was then tested by a large consulting and system integration company in their labs. Looks like when there is a proven market, everybody is interested in providing a solution.
Second, the demand for End-to-End GRC solutions: as KuppingerCole indicated during last year`s GRC event in Frankfurt, more general and broader oriented solution would be necessary and on offer soon. Only 10 month later, not a single-product but a joint solution IS available! SAP and Novell beat our projections and I guess it will take another 6-9 month before we either see another co-op or even a merger between two niche-players to offer a competing solution or product.
Third, the business opportunity: SAP being the Business Intelligence provider they are, quickly was able to provide Novell with numbers on SAP GRC customers and quite a few hundred of them were identified as possible candidates to be addressed for a joint deployment. Vice versa, existing Novell customers with SAP deployments turned out to be of a significant magnitude, thus both groups form a considerable target. We at KuppingerCole can only second, that both the identified customers and the remaining “white space” in the market would benefit from a joint and integrated deployment – the former generating added value almost instantly – the latter reaping the benefits from the then (expectedly) available best practices generated by the early adopters.
General perspective: KuppingerCole sees their own projections and analysis fulfilled ahead of time! SAP and Novell now have a considerable head-start in the market and thus have potential to counter offerings such from Enterprise GRC vendors such as BWise, OpenPages or Mega due to the breadth and depths of the combined solution.
If you like to receive further insight, which GRC approach now makes sense for you, feel free to contact us and make sure to attend our upcoming related webinars http://www.kuppingercole.com/webinars

Communication & Collaboration – that is what email is all about – or should be.
The GoogleWave concept mimics the snail-mail and a wiki at the same time, while being a protocol and an application also.
The demo looks like a cooperative instant-message chat, but showing character by character, making an almost f2f chat impression…
Who used OneNote online before, may be used to see the joint changes of multiple participants in one document – but it is amazing to see even uploads of photos and other material into the wave in a blink of a eye.
To see somebody adding a Google-map into the wave and have it adjusted to show the right location IS amazing!

Let us put it like this:
As a digital nomad and “never in the own office” worker, I want this, and I want it NOW!
Now for Enterprise 2.0:
adding a SAP Business Process Design tool Gravity to Wave enables cooperative work on new process designs inside the Wave.
Re-designing processes to adjust changes caused i.e. by Mergers & Acquisitions now becomes easier due to real-time collaboration between subject matter experts. Cool user experience…

Again, sorry for bothering you with non-IAM information, but this is heavily interesting for those looking into Business-GRC.
Jut now, Nokia, SAP and Gieseke+Devrient announced the JointVenture calles Original1, which will offer SaaS solutions for anti-piracy and anti-conterfeiting projects.
Goal is to enable customs officers, supply-chain service providers and possible whole-sale customers to check and verify if a certain batch or delivery is actually original product or counterfeited merchandise.
The solution will leverage technology by all three vendors, comprising SAP ERP back-end information, Nokia mobile device extensions for on-site reading/scanning of products and Gi+De technology to secure the process steps and information. The company will be led by Claudia Alsdorf as CEO and will be located in Frankfurt, Germany. As to specific requirements, the solutions will be technology agnostic and available on devices and systems not offered by the contributing parties.
Target customers will be the brand-owners and vendors of high-value or high-risk products, e.g. luxury goods, pharmaceuticals or the like.