Hitachi ID services staff can assist customers with product upgrades and the addition of new features and integrations. As with all services, upgrades are performed on a fixed-price, fixed-deliverables basis.

Some notes about product upgrades follow:

How often are new product versions released?

• There is no need to uninstall the original installation of Hitachi ID Management Suite® in order to upgrade. When a new version of Hitachi ID Management Suite is installed on a server that houses an existing (older) instance, the installation wizard prompts for either adding new instances or patching existing ones. When patching is selected, a best-effort automated process is initiated, to migrate all configuration, business logic, user profile data and UI customizations from the old to the new instance.
• The estimated down-time to perform an upgrade per Hitachi ID Management Suite server will take at most 20 minutes (assuming that the upgrade has already been successfully tested on a development Hitachi ID Management Suite server).
• Hitachi ID customers may request upgrades and patches at any time, from their account representative. They receive the files electronically, generally within an hour or so.
• Hitachi ID automatically notifies customers who wish to receive this information of new releases and patches.
• Software upgrades, including major version increases, are included in the standard maintenance contract and do not trigger any additional costs.

Do target system upgrades mandate Hitachi ID Management Suite upgrades?

Since local agents are not required on most types of target systems, and since administrative APIs (application programming interfaces) tend to remain unchanged for long periods, or at least backwards compatible across multiple product versions and service packs, in most cases no update is required on the Hitachi ID Management Suite server to support upgrades on target systems.

Example target system types where upgrades do not require a change on the Hitachi ID Management Suite server include upgrading a Unix server, applying a service pack to Windows domain controllers or upgrading an LDAP directory.

In rare cases, administrative APIs (application programming interfaces) are either retired or changed by a product vendor, in a way that makes them no longer backwards compatible. In these cases, Hitachi ID Management Suite agents either have to be flexible (supporting multiple versions of the same target system) or must be upgraded.

Hitachi ID has technology alliances with a broad array of software vendors, including Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, IBM, RSA, Sun and many others. Early access to new versions of target systems enable Hitachi ID to deliver updated agents on a timely basis to its customers, at no additional cost.

Example target system types where upgrades may require a change on the Hitachi ID Management Suite server include upgrading a Remedy ARS server or a PeopleSoft application. ,

What happens if a target system upgrade does break compatibility?

Hitachi ID Management Suite is architected in such a way that modules can be upgraded without having to upgrade the entire product. For instance, if one particular target is upgraded to a new version that makes the old Hitachi ID Management Suite agent obsolete (unlikely but possible), then just that agent can be replaced with a newer version that supports the new target version.