Novell has opened up the beta for the next iteration of its authentication middleware, Identity Manager 4.  This all went down because of the BrainShare EMEA user and partner conference in Amsterdam last week.

Novell announced that it wants to build and manage internal cloudy infrastructure as well as public clouds as well as make security and access controls to software stacks portable, like virtual machines are today (to a certain degree).

The Standard Edition of Novells new product will scale across larger numbers of users than IDM 3.6, and will also include prepackaged integration with Microsoft SharePoint collaboration software, SAP ERP suites, and cloudy applications such as Salesforce.com and Google Apps. IDM 4 does not yet talk to and manage infrastructure clouds like Amazon EC2 or Rackspace Cloud hosting.

This being said, Dipto Chakravarty the general manager of the Cloud Security business unit at Novell and vice president of worldwide engineering for the unit, did not elaborate on when IDM4 might do access control for popular public clouds, but did say that Novell was working on a cloud security service to provide access control and single sign-on for cloud hosting providers.  Novell is charging a bit more for the Standard Edition of IDM 4 than it did for IDM 3.6: $30 per seat, up from $25.

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