Hot on the heels of last week's acquisition of Credentica by Microsoft, Ping Identity (who I covered here in an On The Radar report) announced yesterday that it has acquired the Sxip Access business unit from Sxip Identity.

Sxip was early to spot the potential opportunity in providing organisations with a simple, easy-to-deploy single sign-on (SSO) solution for software-as-a-service (SaaS). Sxip Access was its response to that opportunity, combining provisioning capabilities with some Sxip hosted services and an appliance. The company had also cultivated relationships with the likes of Salesforce.com and Google (for Google Apps).

The acquisition of Sxip Access is a smart move by Ping Identity. Although it can be used to provide SSO for SaaS, PingFederate (the company's flagship multi-protocol federated identity offering) lacks some of the rapid implementation and deployment capabilities of Sxip Access. Part of the SaaS proposition is that organisations can get up-to-speed much more rapidly. Authentication and authorisation shouldn't hold you back: something that Sxip Access should help to prevent. Back in September Ping began to actively target the SaaS opportunity, allowing providers to sell PingFederate-based SSO to their customers and share the revenue with Ping. Yesterdays announcement should accelerate this.

(As an aside, I do wonder whether we might see Ping's SignOn.com user-centric identity offering heading in the other direction, given that Sxip is now fairly-and-squarely focused there).

Ping and Sxip, whilst they are comparatively small, punch above their weight when it comes to identity mindshare. I wonder whether this announcement might shake the much larger incumbent identity management vendors, none of whom have really articulated a credible SaaS proposition, into action. It should. SaaS buying decisions often bypass the IT organisation and the business buyers aren't (and in fact shouldn't be) interested in identity management: they want access. If a Salesforce.com recommends that the customer just needs to get their IT department to deploy this box and hook it up to the existing identity management solution so be it. Job done. With SaaS increasing in popularity, particularly in the SME segment where they have struggled to gain a foothold, the incumbents need a strong proposition or lose out to the likes of Ping.

Well, better late than never. SAP today announced the acquisition of privately-held MaXware, a supplier of identity management infrastructure. Back in June 2005, I discussed SAP Venture's (its VC arm) investment in another identity management specialist: Ping Identity and at the beginning of 2006 predicted that SAP would enter the identity management acquisition fray. My timing was off but SAP has finally done it. In light of the investment in Ping Identity I was somewhat surprised by the choice of MaXware rather than Ping Identity but I think geography may have had a part to play. It is going to be easier for SAP to integrate a Norwegian company than one based in the US.

MaXware is hardly a new entrant in the market: the company has been around for over 15 years, initially providing virtual directory solutions. The company has subsequently built on that foundation to add identity lifecycle management, provisioning and federated web single sign-on. As a result MaXware provides SAP with a pretty comprehensive set of capabilities to bulk up its NetWeaver and broader application proposition, particularly when it comes to competing with arch-rival Oracle which has done a good job with acquiring and subsequently integrating identity management capabilities as part of Fusion Middleware.

SAP still has some way to go, obviously, when it comes to actually delivering an integrated proposition. The fact that both companies are European should help. However, I note that SAP does not appear on the list of MaXware partners and the press release doesn't mention "building on the existing strong partnership" or "exploiting existing integration between the companies' solutions" (or other such press release-ese) so its difficult to gauge the extent of the technology integration work ahead. Customers and potential customers should look for detailed integration roadmaps.