This week at Red Hat Summit, the industry’s premier open source technology event, Tremolo Security is proud to announce that we are open sourcing the core of Unison on GitHub as a new project: OpenUnison. The new OpenUnison provides the identity management functionality of our commercial Unison product as a J2EE application rather then a virtual appliance. OpenUnison is lightweight enough to deploy alongside J2EE and non-J2EE projects, while still being powerful enough to provide the identity features enterprise applications need.

OpenUnison combines web access management, authentication, provisioning, and identity virtualization in a single system that can be deployed onto any J2EE container. When performing web access management and authentication services OpenUnison sits between your application and users using Tremolo Security’s Last Mile modules to secure the connection without a bulky agent that needs to “call home” to validate tokens. For provisioning services, OpenUnison provides a REST- like set of services that can either be called from Scale, Tremolo Security’s self-service user interface for Unison provisioning capabilities, or directly from your own application. Finally, OpenUnison integrates MyVirtualDirectory for identity virtualization, providing the ability to work with multiple identity sources such as LDAP, Active Directory, cloud services, and more.

So what sets OpenUnison apart from other open source identity management projects? OpenUnison was coded from the start as a standalone system; it isn’t a collection of existing projects that have been assembled to create a service or distribution. OpenUnison was also built with the cloud in mind. It’s lightweight, allowing it to run in very simple configurations easily (such as in a container) while still providing the scale and performance needed for enterprise services. There’s no need to build out large infrastructures of new directories and databases. OpenUnison can leverage what your enterprise already has. Additional infrastructure, such as a relational database, is only required if you plan on using features that require it.

Finally, what sets OpenUnison apart from commercial identity management systems? Open Unison was built on multiple decades of combined experience of our co-founders. This experience has taught us to build small tools that do one thing really well, instead of a large monolithic system that can never do quite what we need without a workaround. This mentality led us to create a lightweight system that scales as needed and is deployed in a fraction of the time.

What next? To learn more, visit http://openunison.io to download Open Unison, see documentation and examples, and access source code. If you’re in Boston at Red Hat Summit, come visit us at booth #1001!