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Company type | Private company |
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Industry | Information technology |
Founded | 2003 |
Headquarters | Oslo, Norway |
Area served | Scandinavia |
Key people | Marit Collin, CEO and founder, Jon Øyvind Eriksen, Chair of the board and founder |
Services | IT consulting, technology, design and UX |
Revenue | ![]() |
Number of employees | ~180 (2021) |
Website | kantega.no |
Kantega is a Norwegian software corporation founded in 2003 with headquarters in Oslo. Kantega primarily develops bespoke software based on Java and lightweight application frameworks. It also has offices in Trondheim and Bergen.
Kantega is a sponsor member of Liberty Alliance and WS-I.
Kantega was founded as an employee-owned company in 2003. However, the company can trace it roots back to Taskon—a Norwegian IT company founded in 1986. This company developed its own object orientation methodology (OORam) and OO design tools, which had some international success. [1] Taskon contributed its object-oriented methodology to the Object Management Group [2] during the standardization process of UML, as part of a joint standards proposal with IBM and Ptech.
Taskon merged with Numerica in 1998, and with Internet Aksess in 1999, which had launched the world's first public mobile web bank on September 24, 1999 using the emerging WAP standard. [3] In December 1999, the company was bought by the Nordic Internet Consultancy Mogul Group (publ.) [4]
In 2002, the company became the first Norwegian member of WS-I. [5] The early focus on web services technology and standards laid the foundation for a strong position in the emerging market for solutions based on Service Oriented Architecture.
In 2003, the Swedish IT group Adera (publ.) launched a public tender for the Mogul group. [6] During the tender period the Norwegian part of the group was bought out by the employees. For a short period the restructured Norwegian company used the former name Taskon, before it changed its name to Kantega.
In 2005, Kantega created the secure web services architectures for the Norwegian government's citizen portal MyPage, [7] which offers a unified view to personal data stored in public registers and the opportunity to submit online applications and notifications. This technology was later used as basis for a service oriented architecture for the pension fund industry, which in 2007 hired Kantega to build Norsk Pensjon, [8] a common internet portal for all major pension funds in Norway, providing all citizens with a unified view of their personal pension holdings across all asset managers.
In 2005, Kantega became the first Norwegian member of Liberty Alliance, [9] signalling an increased focus on internet identity solutions. One year later Kantega created the subsidiary Kantega Secure Identity, which offered the first online identity provider service covering the Nordic countries. In 2007, the subsidiary had received a large market share in the emerging Scandinavian online identity provider market, and was spun off as an independent company under the name Signicat. [10] The successful spin-off attracted 10 million NOK in venture funding in 2008. In 2019, Signicat was sold to Nordic Capital. [11]
The global newspaper Financial Times named Kantega on its 2007 and 2008, lists of the 100 Best Workplaces in Europe. [12] In 2008, the employee-owned company was also recognized as the most family-friendly workplace in Norway. [13]
In 2018, Kantega created the spin-off company, Kantega SSO. [14] KSSO specialize in Single sign-on (SSO) add-ons for Atlassian Confluence, Jira, Bitbucket, Fisheye/Crucible and Bamboo. [15]
Kantega's secure software platform is based on open source Java and web services technology. Kantega uses a variety of security technologies and service oriented architecture standards in order to secure data and information exchange, such as PKI, WS-Security and SAML (federated identity).
A web service (WS) is either:
In software engineering, service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an architectural style that focuses on discrete services instead of a monolithic design. SOA is a good choice for system integration. By consequence, it is also applied in the field of software design where services are provided to the other components by application components, through a communication protocol over a network. A service is a discrete unit of functionality that can be accessed remotely and acted upon and updated independently, such as retrieving a credit card statement online. SOA is also intended to be independent of vendors, products and technologies.
Identity management (IdM), also known as identity and access management, is a framework of policies and technologies to ensure that the right users have the appropriate access to technology resources. IdM systems fall under the overarching umbrellas of IT security and data management. Identity and access management systems not only identify, authenticate, and control access for individuals who will be utilizing IT resources but also the hardware and applications employees need to access.
The Liberty Alliance Project was an organization formed in September 2001 to establish standards, guidelines and best practices for identity management in computer systems. It grew to more than 150 organizations, including technology vendors, consumer-facing companies, educational organizations and governments. It released frameworks for federation, identity assurance, an Identity Governance Framework, and Identity Web Services.
Security Assertion Markup Language is an open standard for exchanging authentication and authorization data between parties, in particular, between an identity provider and a service provider. SAML is an XML-based markup language for security assertions. SAML is also:
A federated identity in information technology is the means of linking a person's electronic identity and attributes, stored across multiple distinct identity management systems.
WS-Management is a DMTF open standard defining a SOAP-based protocol for the management of servers, devices, applications and various Web services. WS-Management provides a common way for systems to access and exchange management information across the IT infrastructure.
Oracle Fusion Middleware consists of several software products from Oracle Corporation. FMW spans multiple services, including Java EE and developer tools, integration services, business intelligence, collaboration, and content management. FMW depends on open standards such as BPEL, SOAP, XML and JMS.
Taskon was a Norwegian IT enterprise which developed systems using object-oriented technology. The company also provided advisory and consultancy services, products, and training within the field of object-oriented systems' development. Formed in 1986 by Trygve Reenskaug, Taskon's expertise was in the area of analysis, design, and implementation of component-based systems.
Virtuoso Universal Server is a middleware and database engine hybrid that combines the functionality of a traditional relational database management system (RDBMS), object–relational database (ORDBMS), virtual database, RDF, XML, free-text, web application server and file server functionality in a single system. Rather than have dedicated servers for each of the aforementioned functionality realms, Virtuoso is a "universal server"; it enables a single multithreaded server process that implements multiple protocols. The free and open source edition of Virtuoso Universal Server is also known as OpenLink Virtuoso. The software has been developed by OpenLink Software with Kingsley Uyi Idehen and Orri Erling as the chief software architects.
IONA Technologies, Inc. was an Irish software company founded in 1991. It began as a campus company linked to Trinity College Dublin had its headquarters in Dublin, and eventually also expanded its offices in Boston and Tokyo. It specialised in distributed service-oriented architecture (SOA) technology, its products connecting systems and applications by creating a network of services without requiring a centralised server or creating an information technology project. IONA was the first Irish company to float on the NASDAQ exchange. It was valued at up to US$1.75 billion at its peak. It was one of the world's 10 largest software-only companies, and around 30 new ventures spun out from it. IONA was sold to Progress Software in 2008.
The Devices Profile for Web Services (DPWS) defines a minimal set of implementation constraints to enable secure web service messaging, discovery, description, and eventing on resource-constrained devices.
Apache Axis2 is a web service engine. It is a redesign and re-write of the widely used Apache Axis SOAP stack. Implementations of Axis2 are available in Java and C.
Apache CXF is an open source software project developing a Web services framework. It originated as the combination of Celtix developed by IONA Technologies and XFire developed by a team hosted at the now defunct host CodeHaus in 2006. These two projects were combined at the Apache Software Foundation. The name "CXF" was derived by combining "Celtix" and "XFire".
WS-Federation is an Identity Federation specification, developed by a group of companies: BEA Systems, BMC Software, CA Inc., IBM, Microsoft, Novell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and VeriSign. Part of the larger Web Services Security framework, WS-Federation defines mechanisms for allowing different security realms to broker information on identities, identity attributes and authentication.
The Microsoft Open Specification Promise is a promise by Microsoft, published in September 2006, to not assert its patents, in certain conditions, against implementations of a certain list of specifications.
OpenAM is an open-source access management, entitlements and federation server platform. Now it is supported by Open Identity Platform Community.
Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) is a set of specifications that encompasses the XML-format for security tokens containing assertions to pass information about a user and protocols and profiles to implement authentication and authorization scenarios. This article has a focus on software and services in the category of identity management infrastructure, which enable building Web-SSO solutions using the SAML protocol in an interoperable fashion. Software and services that are only SAML-enabled do not go here.
ZXID.org Identity Management toolkit implements standalone SAML 2.0, Liberty ID-WSF 2.0, and XACML 2.0 stacks and aims at implementing all popular federation, SSO, and ID Web Services protocols. It is a C implementation with minimal external dependencies - OpenSSL, CURL, and zlib – ensuring easy deployment. Due to its small footprint and efficient and accurate schema driven implementation, it is suitable for embedded and high volume applications. Language bindings to all popular highlevel languages such as PHP, Perl, and Java, are provided via SWIG. ZXID implements, as of Nov 2011, SP, IdP, WSC, WSP, Discovery, PEP, and PDP roles. ZXID is the reference implementation of the core security architecture of the TAS3.eu project.
Frank Leymann is a German computer scientist and mathematician. He is professor of computer science at the University of Stuttgart, Germany, and director and founder of the Institute of Architecture of Application Systems (IAAS).
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