Courion Corporation Achieves Gold Medal Status in Bloor Research's Evaluation of Identity Management - User Provisioning; Courion's Provisioning Solution Provides Flexibility to Address Constant Change.

FRAMINGHAM, Mass. -- Courion(R) Corporation, a leading provider of enterprise provisioning solutions, today announced that it has been awarded a Gold Medal for Provisioning in Bloor Research's 2005 report for Identity Management. Bloor Research is a leading provider of information technology (IT) research, advisory services, and strategic consulting. The new evaluation provides an objective assessment of companies providing identity management technologies.

Courion was positioned in the "Champion" and "Innovator" segments of the Landscape Bullseye(TM) comparative analysis, and was specifically recognized for its mature provisioning capabilities based on a solid heritage, strong relationships with strategic partners and long-term strategy and vision. Courion received high scores for the stability, speed and effectiveness of its technology, the quality of product and services offered, the ability to deliver ROI to customers and corporate viability. Courion also received high scores in the areas ease of implementation, support and architecture.

According to the report, effective provisioning solutions should accommodate for the changing nature of today's business; "as roles change within an organization, the provisioning application should be able to automatically update all associated permissions." The strength of Courion's Enterprise Provisioning Suite(TM) is its ability to integrate provisioning into the enterprise by leveraging the existing infrastructure to enable rapid and effective change management. Through Dynamic Community(TM)-based provisioning, a technique for managing the real-time assembly - at the point when a provisioning action is taken - of groups of people or resources organized by any set of common characteristics based on business, security and operational policies, Courion's Enterprise Provisioning Suite greatly reduces the time, risk and cost of implementing provisioning solutions. By connecting to the underlying data defining work communities and policies where they exist, Dynamic Community-based provisioning provides agility to the provisioning infrastructure, reflecting the dynamic nature of how organizations quickly assemble, disassemble, and re-assemble communities of staff, partners and contractors to drive business operations while ensuring data security and compliance.

"The purpose of this report is to help IT professionals understand the Identity Management landscape and evaluate those features and vendors most valuable and relevant to their business needs." said Fran Howarth, practice leader, Bloor Research. "Organizations are facing daunting challenges to account for user access and meet a bevy of government regulations despite the fact networks are becoming more complex, corporate boundaries are becoming more porous, the workforce is increasingly composed of "non-traditional" workers, and more businesses are sharing information with third party vendors and partners. It is critical that today's business put in place an Identity Management strategy to address these challenges. Choosing the appropriate solution will not only mitigate risk and ensure compliance, but if done correctly, will also increase productivity and reduce costs in the long run."

"We are pleased by Bloor Research's recognition of Courion's technology leadership," said Chris Zannetos, president and CEO, Courion Corporation. "We differentiate ourselves from other vendors in this space by delivering provisioning technology that works in the real world and not just on paper or in press releases - technology that delivers concrete, measurable and timely compliance, security and productivity results without compromising business momentum. These results are visible in our customer conference being attended by over 70 customer organizations, with over a dozen customers speaking about real accomplishments. These results are visible in customers' willingness to publicly identify the cost savings, compliance benefits and service improvements that they are actually achieving. These results are what Courion's staff are dedicated to delivering to customers."

About Bloor Research

Founded in 1989, Bloor Research is one of the world's leading IT research, analysis and consultancy organisations - distributing research and analysis to IT user and vendor organisations throughout the world via online subscriptions, tailored research services and consultancy projects.

Bloor Research's research and analysis have been acknowledged by the world's press, other industry analysts and commentators as some of the most authoritative work ever produced on computing and business issues. The accuracy and integrity of our research and its impartial conclusions have earned Bloor Research international acclaim.

About Courion

Courion enables complex organizations to rapidly respond to constant change. Unlike traditional identity and access management technologies, Courion's Dynamic Community(TM)-based Provisioning empowers you to deliver transparent compliance, sustained efficiencies and improved business velocity, by effectively adapting to and leveraging your changing business operations, technology infrastructure and organization. Over 255 enterprise customers worldwide including 60 of the FORTUNE 500 utilize Courion's Enterprise Provisioning Suite(TM) to securely automate routine, manual processes for user provisioning, password management, industry and regulatory compliance, profile management, and digital certificate management. For more information, contact Courion's headquarters in Framingham, MA, USA at 508-879-8400 or visit www.courion.com.

Courion is a registered trademark and Dynamic Communities and Enterprise Provisioning Suite are trademarks of Courion Corporation.