Faced with a growing number of identity management competitors, Computer Associates International Inc. plans to juggle its product lineup once again, this time consolidating two security lines in an effort to ease customer deployment and integration.

At the Computer Security Institute conference in Washington this week, CA is announcing the availability of eTrust Admin Version 8.0, the first piece of the company's new eTrust Identity and Access Management Suite. This release will be followed in the coming months by new versions of a handful of other products, including eTrust Access Control, Audit, Directory, Single Sign-On and Web Access Control. CA officials said all the pieces of the suite should be available by May.

The new integrated suite structure holds appeal for large enterprises because of the improved level of granularity it delivers, customers say.

"It's a great grouping. It's all about access control through workflow," said Richard Baich, chief information security officer at ChoicePoint Inc., a CA customer in Alpharetta, Ga. "Access control can be very labor-intensive. In the end, it's one of the top three priorities in security."

This move is the latest in a long line of CA product reshufflings in recent years. While many of the previous moves have been about semantics and politics, the consolidation of two of CA's four security lines is aimed at gaining technical efficiencies and improving the customer's use of the products, officials said. All the products in the newly created suite will share a common user interface and an underlying technology platform.

Customers will still be able to select any combination of the available products in an a la carte fashion. The entire suite will include support for a number of security industry standards, including Security Assertion Markup Language and Security Provisioning Markup Language.

In eTrust Admin 8.0, CA has included new customization capabilities that enable administrators to alter the flow control of the user provisioning process. For example, customers can now insert executables or scripts into the provisioning flow. The forthcoming eTrust Web Access Control release will give administrators the ability to control which users can employ which Web services, said Bill Mann, vice president of eTrust security solutions at CA, in Islandia, N.Y.