Janrain launches its new Identity Central solution

Janrain’s depiction of a client company’s calls to its cloud platform, over the OIDC (OpenID Connect 1.0) protocol.

Identity management platform Janrain is out Wednesday with its new Identity Central platform, which it says is the first such end-to-end cloud-based solution.

Identity Central is all-hosted. Before, CEO Jim Kaskade noted, his company offered a suite of applications running on the OpenID protocol, which provides a standard for identity authorization/authentication services.

A client company would use the suite to enable social sign-ons between sites, such as employing your Facebook login across sites and managing user identity. But some of the needed components — notably, the user interface — had to be developed by the client company and hosted on the client’s own on-premises or cloud server.

Now, he said, the new Identity Central is updated to the newer OpenID Connect 1.0 protocol, and provides pre-made customizable interfaces that Janrain hosts. A client company only needs to host some software library components on its end, but doesn’t need to develop or host any applications or interfaces. The entire Janrain identity management solution is now available in the cloud via an API.

Designed to scale. Marketers can deploy the identity management solution across many sites or mobile apps “in minutes, instead of weeks,” Kaskade said, without any software development or hosting.

While Janrain’s Customer Identity Access Management (CIAM) competitors are also supporting the newest OpenID protocol in their identity management solutions, he said that they still require client companies to build and host some of their own components, such as interfaces.

The new platform is the latest step in Janrain’s centralization drive, which included the company’s release last year of centralized policy access control for identity management.

Why this matters to marketers. Given the importance of first-party data, ad targeting and user privacy, identity management has become an intrinsic — but complicated — part of the marketer’s toolkit.

Such issues as security, streamlined consent management and governmental regulations are some of the drivers behind Janrain’s full hosted solution. Because of these reasons, it will not be surprising to see other platforms soon offer a similar, fully cloud-based offering, which could help marketers meet the growing set of requirements for maintaining customer identities.

About The Author

Barry Levine

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.