About Symlabs

Symlabs focuses on Identity Management. We offer "standards based" software components like the Symlabs Virtual Directory Server, Symlabs LDAP Proxy and the Symlabs Federated Identity Suite. We also offer software support, training and professional services.

Symlabs has offices located in the USA and Europe and we support an international client list. Customers such as Ask.com, Tibco, Intel, Nokia, IBM, Sun Microsystems, United Nations Development Programme, Vodafone and Bancomer have worked with Symlabs to simplify problems within their identity management "ecosystems".

Symlabs "standards based" software components universally plug into all major IdM "ecosystems" offered by Microsoft, Sun, IBM, Novell, Computer Associates, HP and Oracle.

History

Symlabs was founded in 2001 with the vision to simplify and enhance directory services and identity management. Its founders, having worked as consultants for many years, were looking for solutions to many problems faced during the roll-out and integration of directory and identity services. On many projects, migrations would be complex and take months until realization. Integration of applications was difficult and cumbersome. Many customers would constantly re-invent custom middleware and other code. The real potential of directory and identity management applications working together could never be fully unlocked because there were always seemingly intractable issues at hand.

The idea was born for a technology to solve these issues. This technology would bridge the gap between applications, "gluing" them together seamlessly. Instead of having to adopt each application to the installed identity management infrastructure, this technology would allow each application to work in its desired way, providing all the mapping needed to make all the components fit together.

Through the personal involvement at some very large carrier-type projects involving directories and messaging solutions for tens of millions of entries, Symlabs' founders also gained first-hand experience to the specialized needs of those deployments. When server data loads can take several days, or even weeks because of their sheer size, and thousands of operations need to be handled per second, normal data center rules do not apply any more. Regular directory deployments do not scale well to these requirements, and special enhancements need to be made to support those magnitudes. Symlabs' technology would be designed with those needs in mind, and be able to scale effortlessly to those requirements. Additionally, Symlabs' technology would extend applications to fulfill the rigorous requirements imposed on them when running in such large data/high throughput environments.

Symlabs' Original Flagship Product: Directory Extender

The technology was named the DirectoryScript platform and it debuted in June 2002. The platform consisted of a high-performance I/O engine with flexible protocol adapter modules and an embedded scripting language that was designed to be very easy to learn for programmers already familiar with scripting languages such as Perl, PHP and UNIX shell. The DirectoryScript Platform was the foundation for Symlabs' flagship product, Directory Extender, a versatile, flexible and high-performance Virtual Directory and LDAP Proxy.

Directory Extender has since been deployed on sites ranging from simple installations with a single directory server containing a few thousand entries to complex, performance-hungry environments with tens of millions of entries, thousands of operations per seconds, and very complex requirements. Directory Extender excels where other Virtual Directories run out of steam due to lack of features, complexity or limited performance.

Symlabs' Role in Federated Identity Management and the Liberty Alliance

Symlabs has been actively contributing to the Liberty Alliance since 2002, and Symlabs' employees have played a pivotal role in several of the Project Liberty specifications, namely the PP-SP profile. Due to this involvement, Symlabs was among the first companies to implement the Alliance's V1.1 specification, namely the software for IdP (Identity Provider) servers and a SP (Service Provider) server toolbox. This implementation, also based on the DirectoryScript platform, boasts high versatility through its modular, extensible approach that allows users to hook into many parts of the actual code, and its extremely high performance of up to multiple thousands of operations per second. The product is named Symlabs Federation Identity Suite and has been available since February 2004.

About Symlabs