SPX Brings Together Global Workforce with Novell Identity Services Solution

  • Fortune 500 company deploys Novell Nsure and exteNd solution to integrate disparate
  • Novell solution deployed on the Linux operating system

22 March 2004

SPX Corporation, a Fortune 500 provider of technical and industrial products and services, manages a dynamic and growing business portfolio. One of the hallmarks of the company's success has been growth across its nine strategic platforms. SPX has acquired a number of businesses over the last several years and needed to find a cost-effective solution to integrate its business operations, improve productivity and ensure security across the enterprise – and it had to run on Linux*.

The $5 billion global, multi-industry company chose Novell® Nsure™ and exteNd™ to create a baseline secure identity management and services-oriented application infrastructure so that new applications and databases, with their respective user identity stores and access control policies, could be quickly integrated into the corporate network. With this infrastructure in place they can provide authorized users with the information they need, when they need it.

"We need to be able to quickly integrate new companies into our environment and bring together disparate systems," said SPX CIO Pete Sattler. "Novell's support for multiple platforms, systems and standards allows us to quickly tie new systems into our directory and automatically provision services for those in the acquired company."

Novell's consultants worked with SPX to design and deploy a strategic directory architecture, which serves as the foundation of the secure identity management infrastructure. This architecture uses Novell eDirectory™ as the central repository of user identity information and Novell Nsure Identity Manager (formerly DirXML®) to synchronize identity information with other applications. Both products were deployed on Linux because of the strong return on investment and lower overall cost offered by open source software.

With an identity foundation in place, the decentralized company could get its arms around the IT organization and begin to implement solutions with very tangible benefits. Administrators could enforce tight password control and ensure compliance with government regulations and standards. The team was able to pull together user information from dozens of systems throughout the company in order to move forward on a number of initiatives, such as providing employees with single sign-on capabilities and deploying a single, secure corporate white pages application.

Novell exteNd was used with Novell Nsure to build an identity-enabled Web services framework to integrate information from global business units with the main system in the United States and present it securely through an employee portal. Now employees have a single point of access to manage their identity, and managers and IT professionals can quickly provision or de-provision employees.

"We really looked at Web services and identity management as one solution, because the Web services are best executed in concert with secure identity management," Sattler said. "exteNd is also a perfect fit, because its intuitive development interface allowed our development team to quickly learn and implement solutions using the technology."

Moving forward, SPX will tap Novell ZENworks® to manage the company's distributed environment, and expand its use of Novell exteNd to deliver information to end users around the globe. SPX's corporate application development group will also use Novell exteNd for internal IT projects and to further leverage existing infrastructure investments by linking silos of information across the company.

"The solutions that we're delivering through Novell Nsure and exteNd are helping us to lower our overall IT administrative costs," Sattler said. "Novell is more to SPX than just a vendor. They're a strategic partner that helps us solve our business challenges."

About SPX
SPX Corporation (NYSE:SPW) is a global provider of technical products and systems, industrial products and services, flow technology, cooling technologies and services and service solutions. The Internet address for SPX Corporation's home page is http://www.spx.com.

About Novell

Novell, Inc. (Nasdaq: NOVL) is a leading provider of infrastructure software and services to over 50,000 customers in 43 countries. With more than 20 years of experience in data center, workgroup and desktop solutions, Novell's 6,000 employees, 5,000 partners and support centers around the world are meeting customer requirements for identity-driven computing and Linux solutions. By providing enterprise-class software and support for commercial and open source software, Novell delivers increased operating flexibility and choice at a lower total cost of ownership. More information about Novell can be found at http://www.novell.com.

Novell, DirXML, Ximian and ZENworks are registered trademarks; BrainShare is a registered service mark; eDirectory, exteNd, Nsure and Nterprise are trademarks; and Ngage is a service mark of Novell, Inc. in the United States and other countries. SUSE is a registered trademark of SUSE AG, a Novell company. *All third-party trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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