Name: Michel Prompt
Age: 57
Position: CEO
Previous jobs: CEO/Founder Matesys Corp; Senior Vice President of Client/Server Technology at Sterling Software
Education: Prompt received his diploma from Institut Politiques de Paris (Political Sciences Institute of Paris). He has a Masters degree in applied mathematics from Paris Dauphine University and received a diploma of advanced studies in computer science from Paris Dauphine University.
Presentations: Regular speaker and participant on panels at industry events such as Burton Catalyst, European Identity Conference (EIC) and Digital ID World (DIDW)
Family: married, 3 children
Residence: Novato, CA

In the following interview, Michel Prompt, Chief Executive Officer of Radiant Logic discusses 1:1 with Rake Narang, Editor-in-chief of Info Security Products Guide, on creating and managing a flexible identity infrastructure.

Rake Narang, Editor-in-Chief - Info Security Products Guide: With the continuously changing and evolving business models and processes how are virtual directory solutions useful?

Michel Prompt: As heterogeneity, data volumes, and new business requirements continue to rise within the enterprise, administrators are looking for better, more specialized tools to deal with these challenges. Virtual directories are a cost-effective, easy to deploy solution that enables enterprises to isolate their application layer from the complexity of the underlying data sources. With virtualization, companies don’t have to force changes on existing data stores to accommodate new and evolving business requirements. Virtual directory solutions—such as those found in our market-leading RadiantOne products—are well suited to grow and expand with the enterprise.

RadiantOne Virtualization enables organizations to create a flexible identity infrastructure, enabling authentication, authorization, audit, and profile management for enterprise initiatives, such as Web Access Management, Portal SSO, and Federation. Our RadiantOne products are purpose-built to meet the challenges of identity integration in heterogeneous environments, delivering everything from simple directory aggregation to a complete data model-driven solution for identity integration.

Rake Narang: Do most enterprises already have proper identity infrastructure in place? How have Radiant Logic, Inc. solutions evolved over the years?

Michel Prompt: Enterprises come to us for exactly that reason, because their existing infrastructure doesn’t support the demands of modern architectures or increasingly complex security and compliance requirements. Now, a comprehensive identity integration solution has traditionally meant deploying multiple products, requiring big investments and long deployment times. The result is a brittle system that’s too large and complex to be cost-effective and too inflexible to accommodate shifting needs and new architectures. Of course, adapting to changing requirements becomes more and more difficult as the number, volume, and disparate nature of sources within the enterprise infrastructure increase. But virtualization changes all that.

Our RadiantOne product line has evolved in direct response to our customers’ needs. We’ve learned some very important things over many years of real-life deployments: one is that use cases always end up being more complex than expected, and another is that data is more heterogeneous than expected. Our latest product release is a direct result of this knowledge. To better meet the needs of different market segments, we split our market-leading RadiantOne Virtual Directory Server into two separate editions—Proxy and Context—so enterprises can choose the version that suits their current needs, at a good price, then scale up easily as future needs require. This allows us to solve not only the “classic” virtual directory use case of user-directory integration, but also more advanced use cases, such as identity correlation, identity integration, and context management.

Rake Narang: Where would Radiant Logic, Inc. solutions best fit today? And what are the factors that make Radiant Logic, Inc. most suitable in such environments?

Michel Prompt: There are sweet spots for traditional virtual directories in the sense of federated queries or when the underlying data sources can handle the load and queries. But there are many use cases and deployment scenarios where these solutions won't scale. In that case, data synchronization, including staging and caching, is an absolute requirement.

That’s why we’ve segmented our flagship Virtual Directory Server (VDS) product into categories that are designed to fit the deployment environment. For classic virtual directory use cases—integrating user-directories—we offer RadiantOne VDS Proxy Edition. For larger and more complex environments made up of directories, databases, web services, and legacy applications, we have RadiantOne VDS Context Edition. For environments requiring off-line correlation of identities and easy-to-deploy synchronization capabilities, there’s the RadiantOne Identity and Correlation Server (ICS). The RadiantOne product suite is the only one on the market that gives you a seamless upgrade path, thanks to a common data model and virtualization engine between all products. With RadiantOne, customers have not only a tactical point solution for today’s pain points, but a strategic implementation to accommodate new business requirements in a pay-as-you-go format.

All About Radiant Logic, Inc.
Head Office Address: 1682 Novato Blvd. Suite 300, Novato, CA 94947
Founded in: 1998
CEO: Michel Prompt
Public or Private: Private
Investors: N/A
Number of Employees: 22
Products: RadiantOne Virtual Directory Server (VDS) Proxy Edition 5.1, RadiantOne Virtual Directory Server (VDS) Context Edition 5.1, RadiantOne Identity and Correlation Server (ICS) 5.2.
Company’s Goals: Radiant Logic, Inc. is the leading provider of virtual directory solutions for identity management and enterprise information integration. As the virtual directory market leader, Radiant Logic The RadiantOne™ Identity and Context Virtualization Platform is being utilized by Fortune 500 corporations to provide virtual access to any applications and data sources for authentication, authorization, profile and personalization data, for portals, and services provisioning for application integration projects.
Recent Company and Product Awards Won: eWeek Excellence Awards Finalists,
Info Security Products Guide Hot Companies 2006