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.