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Microsoft Corp. recently announced the acquisition of Alacris Inc., a global provider of certificate management and identity assurance software products. The acquisition enhances Microsoft's strategy of providing easily administered identity and access management solutions.

"Customers have told us that smart cards are becoming an increasingly important part of their authentication and authorization strategy," said Mike Nash, corporate vice president of the Security Technology Unit at Microsoft. "Through this acquisition, we're excited to gain technology that makes it easier for customers to take advantage of the smart card capabilities in Windows with tools to simplify smart card life-cycle management."

Today, Microsoft Windows provides a best-of-breed platform for utilizing smart cards and other strong authentication technologies on the desktop through Active Directory and Microsoft Certificate Services. However, enterprise customers are still challenged with the complexity of provisioning smart card hardware, deploying digital certificates, managing certificate revocation, and auditing IT pro and end-user activity. The key to successful smart card implementation is tailoring the infrastructure to the specific needs of the organization. Alacris' products address this need by delivering integrated solutions that provide simplified management and end- user experiences through advanced policy and workflow.

Alacris' technology provides digital certificate and smart card life-cycle management solutions that help customers deploy, manage and maintain a smart- card-based infrastructure for customers who want to benefit from the strong authentication that Windows-based smart cards provide. Alacris's core technology helps IT departments streamline the provisioning of new smart cards and the configuration of existing smart cards. The technology also provides Web-based policy-driven workflow management that helps users manage their administrative and end-user experiences. In addition, the technology lowers the overall cost of Windows-based smart card infrastructure by providing tools that enable users to self-administer common tasks.

"We are extremely proud of our work in developing strong authentication solutions," said Ron Mac Donell, president and chief executive officer of Alacris. "We are thrilled that our technology will become part of Microsoft's security product offerings and that it will be delivered to a larger group of customers."

The availability of a beta version of Alacris' technologies will be announced at a future date. More information about Microsoft's identity and access management solutions can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/idm . More information about Alacris is available at http://www.alacris.com/ .