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Reston, Virginia; November 18, 2010 - Daon, the award-winning global provider of identity assurance software and services, announced today the addition of the company’s Credential Create product to the US General Services Administration’s (GSA) Approved Products List (APL). The GSA APL is an important requirement in the procurement process for the US Federal Government Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12 (HSPD-12) and the closely aligned Federal Information Processing Standards 201 (FIPS 201).

As part of Daon’s product portfolio focused on large scale credentialing, Credential Create is a software product that electronically encodes a smartcard credential with an identity and prints the surface of the credential according to defined profiles.

In providing this functionality, Credential Create is different than a traditional smart card management system (SCMS) in a two important ways. First, Credential Create relies on a separate identity source to hold its identity information. It can be configured to integrate with Daon’s own Identity repository, Daon Engine, or instead integrate with any mainstream Identity Management solution, such as Oracle, Sun, or Novell. By not establishing yet another data silo, the result is a more integrated identity and card production system that is less complex, less costly, and much easier to maintain.

Credential Create also differs from a traditional SCMS in that it has been created and optimized to specifically target identity schemes instead of general card schemes and embraces an identity-centric model rather than a card-centric model. Whereas a traditional SCMS has a more general horizontal view of a card scheme - identity cards, EMV cards, loyalty cards, etc. - Credential Create is only targeted at identity card schemes. This focus keeps Credential Create lightweight, once again providing an identity system delivering all the benefits of smart card technology in a product which is markedly less complex, less costly, and easier to maintain.

Key features of Credential Create include:

• PIV Compatibility: Out-of-the-box Credential Create will produce a FIPS 201 Compatible credential with no further configuration necessary.
• Identity Database Independent: Credential Create is designed to work with a variety of identity repositories. It is integrated out-of-the-box with the DaonEngine. Because its services are exposed via web-services it can operate with other Identity Management (IdM) software such as provided by Oracle, Sun, and Novell. In such an instance Credential Create relies on the identity data stored in the IdM application.
• Card profiles: Recognizing that even small organizations issue a variety of credentials, Credential Create has been designed to support a variety of card profiles. Each profile can have a different configuration of the electronic and surface characteristics of the credential.
• Lifecycle Management Credential Create allows the complete management of the card from the point of issuance to the point that the card is terminated. This includes actions such as PIN reset, revoking, suspending, re-issuance and renewal.

According to Daon’s CEO, Tom Grissen, “Inclusion on the GSA APL is very important in the US Federal government market, as agencies are not inclined to purchase products that have not passed the approval of GSA. The approval of Credential Create further broadens Daon’s ability to meet the immediate needs of government agencies for PIV.”

About Daon
Daon is a leading provider of identity assurance software products focused on meeting the needs of governments and commercial organizations worldwide. Daon supports customers and system integrators in building enterprise solutions requiring the highest level of security, performance, scalability, reliability and privacy. Daon’s COTS products are scalable, flexible and proven in the most challenging real-world environments and have been selected to secure more than 700 million identities around the globe. The Daon product suite covers every aspect of identity management from pre-enrollment and identity proofing to enrollment, multimodal capture, adjudication, credentialing and provisioning; and provides a technology agnostic approach which gives leverage to the customer. Daon’s offices are located in Washington DC, New York, Canberra, Singapore, London and Dublin.