According to the Gartner Group, automated identity and access management can deliver an ROI of nearly 300% and savings of $3.5 million over three years to a typical business with 10,000 employees. User provisioning is the combined business and technical solution that companies use to manage user access to systems, Web and non-Web applications including accounts, access rights and the access request approval process. Accommodating external customers and partners also offers attractive rewards - Gartner estimates that externally-oriented access management solutions deliver an ROI of 375%.

"The majority of money saved through automated provisioning would come from head count reduction and productivity gains," Gartner noted. According to Meta Group, user management consumes 5.25% of all IT expenses. Such savings opportunities capture the attention of CIOs. But these solutions also offer added benefits.

Meta found that most user access changes (e.g., hiring or promoting of an employee who needs access to numerous databases or applications) take ten times longer than necessary. As organizations become more dynamic with such changes for employees, contractors, customers and partners occurring more frequently, such delays have a noticeable impact on performance and productivity.

Maybe most significantly these days is the security and compliance risk posed by incorrect access rights. Surveys acknowledge a 23% increase in risk of security breaches due to incorrect access settings. Meta found that in a large enterprise a new user is provisioned to 16 applications but upon departure is only deleted from 10. Clearly such on-going access to those not intended creates significant liabilities for companies.

Bridgestream offers a web-based enterprise software product that addresses a key missing component of the identity management and security infrastructure. BridgeStream uses a unique rule-based system to reinterpret the vast and conflicting repositories of employee, contractor, customer and vendor data to provide role, access, and authority information to mission-critical enterprise applications. The business rules and authorizations maintained by BridgeStream ensure significantly higher levels of compliance to security policies, auditable authorities, enterprise scaleable workflows, and automation of error prone processes.

BridgeStream has recently installed its product at a Fortune 50 financial institution which is using BridgeStream to capture the complex reporting and business relationships among its 150,000 employees, its customers, and its suppliers. This information will drive the many workflows and business processes in their CRM, purchasing, and travel and expense reimbursement systems while ensuring accuracy and compliance throughout. Outlook Ventures and Hummer Winblad recently co-led the Series A funding.

New Investments: Instore Card

Online advertising can lift offline sales by as much as 12.5% according to studies conducted by Marketing Evolution and four consumer packaged goods giants - Procter & Gamble, Nestle SA, Kraft Foods and Johnson & Johnson. Other recent research has come to similar conclusions. For example, a study by Dynamic Logic in early March concluded that online advertising provides a 24% lift in message association and significant increases to other brand metrics.

Instore Card readily enables traditional retailers to address this opportunity to leverage online marketing to drive in-store sales. Instore Card provides retailers with private label loyalty solutions on an easy-to-deploy hosted basis. The company's flagship product, Instant Loyalty, helps retailers build a loyal customer base. Instant Loyalty enables any retailer to immediately leapfrog their competition, keeping their best customers through automatically targeted discreet promotions and unparalleled ease of communication. Additionally, Instant Loyalty allows retailers to quickly analyze behavior of its most profitable, loyal customers to drive business decisions.

The company's founder, Mark Goldstein, brings a wealth of retail and start-up expertise. Prior to founding Instore Card in 2003 Mr. Goldstein was CEO of Bluelight, K-Mart's online retail business. Mr. Goldstein also founded and served as CEO of Impulse Buy Network, a pioneer in the deployment of merchandising solutions for online retailers, which was acquired by Inktomi in 1999. Outlook Ventures, Canaan Partners and Mobius Venture Capital recently co-led the company's Series A funding.