Temporary workers are critical to the Omaha Public Power District (OPPD) during power outages, but they pose special problems for Ron Workman, OPPD's supervisor of information protection.

Workman must provide temporary passwords and user names for as many as 200 contractors, as he did last month during a cleanup and maintenance check of the Fort Calhoun Station nuclear power plant in Nebraska. And users must be set up quickly. OPPD pays $500,000 per day for replacement power during downtime, and it loses thousands more if contractors are kept waiting.

Until three years ago, Workman used homegrown software for managing user-access accounts for OPDD's temporary workers and 2,400 employees. Then OPDD moved to enRole software from Technologic Software Concepts Inc., a consulting firm in Irvine, California. Workman says enRole squeezed turnaround time down from a week to about six minutes, freeing staff to spend more time monitoring security.

"It's meeting our requirements, and it's meeting them very well," Workman says, naming occasional and very minor bugs as the software's only faults. "It runs and runs and runs."

What EnRole Does

EnRole's developers left in January 1999 to form what's now Access360, also in Irvine. Today, flush with more than $70 million in venture capital funding, the company sells enRole to a growing list of major customers like BP Amoco PLC in London and ETrade Group Inc. in Menlo Park, Calif.

EnRole lets administrators rapidly respond to changing employee roles or add and remove rights for temporary workers or extranet partners, all from a single management console. EnRole unifies each user's profile and access privileges in a central repository so administrators don't have to track scattered accounts for different applications and operating systems. Then it automatically performs the tasks each application requires to sign up or remove users.

"Every large or medium or fast-growing business has a number of computing platforms that are in place, as well as many, many people trying to access those applications," says Access360 President and CEO Yuri Pikover. "Somebody, somewhere, somehow needs to keep track of it all."

Besides the repository, the two other main components of enRole are a workflow engine, which contains rules that decide who has rights to which applications, and "software agents," which let enRole work with more than 55 major operating systems, databases, e-mail platforms and enterprise applications.

"The [enRole] app server is essentially a workflow engine," Pikover says. "When it detects a change, it will then issue a command to an agent to provision that user appropriately."

Well Positioned

Access360 seems well positioned to exploit two growth areas: application service providers (ASP) and companies building what Pikover calls "virtual enterprises" using business-to-business systems. Both must quickly and efficiently define who has rights to use particular applications.

"People just become part of a B2B trading community, but no one is solving the provisioning problem," Pikover says. "You end up defaulting to the lowest common denominator." With enRole, he says, companies can provide finely tuned access.

To serve both markets, Access360 is working on a more scalable, distributed version of enRole for shipment later this year. Also in the works is an ASP-based service called Access360.net that the company will pilot this quarter and launch by midyear. "We're also branching out to extend the provisioning to noncomputing entities such as credit cards and cell phones," says Jeff Drake, Access360's founder and executive vice president.

Access360 won't likely fail from a lack of demand. "[Managing user access is] a problem that everybody has," says Chris Christiansen, an analyst at IDC in Framingham, Massachusetts.

Neil Goldman, director of Internet computing strategies at The Yankee Group in Boston, describes Access360 as a strong player in a small but important niche. "[Managing user access] is a big problem for companies," Goldman says. "The question is whether the pain is bigger than other pains companies have right now."