E-Commerce infrastructure solutions provider Netegrity Inc. announced what it called a
“breakthrough technology for securing and managing affiliate networks.”
For the first time, this new affiliate services technology enables e-commerce
portals to expand their offerings by integrating partners into a virtual
portal that provides a unified set of services to customers, the company said.
This new technology is delivered as a new shared service built on the
SiteMinder 4.0 release, which begins shipping this week.
SiteMinder 4.0 now
provides affiliate agent technology that extends single sign-on and user
entitlement information beyond the main portal and to the affiliate sites,
the company said. When the user moves to an affiliate site, SiteMinder
provides the new Affiliate Agent, which is installed on the affiliate site,
with all the information to automatically authenticate the user and
personalize content based on the user’s unique entitlement information.
“Until SiteMinder 4.0, there has been no technology that can tightly link
portals and their affiliates together, enabling them to provide their users
with a high quality, personalized, and secure user experience anywhere they
go on the affiliate network,” said Barry Bycoff, president and chief executive officer, of
Netegrity.
The affiliate services framework will be based on XML to provide portals with
an open and extensible approach to extending Internet services such as
authentication, authorization and personalization to their affiliates.