1 Introduction

The KuppingerCole Leadership Compass provides an overview of vendors and their product or service offerings in a certain market segment. This Leadership compass focuses on the market segment of Identity as a Service which delivers a Single Sign-On experience to users, with a focus on Single Sign-On to cloud services, but not limited to these. In short, we named this segment IDaaS SSO.

1.1 Market Segment

The IDaaS market has evolved over the past few years and is still growing, both in size and in the number of vendors. However, under the umbrella term of IDaaS, we find a variety of offerings. IDaaS in general provides Identity & Access Management and Access Governance capabilities as a service, ranging from Single Sign-On to full Identity Provisioning and Access Governance for both on-premise and cloud solutions. Solutions also vary in their support for different groups of users such as employees, business partners, and customers, their support for mobile users, and their integration capabilities back to on-premise environments.

For that purpose, we have split the IDaaS market into three distinct market segments. Some vendors serve two or all three segments with their IDaaS services, while others focus on a single segment. The three IDaaS market segment in the KuppingerCole definition are:

• IDaaS SSO: IDaaS focused on providing a Single Sign-On experience to users. While the primary focus is on providing access for employees to cloud services, we also look for support for other groups of users such as business partners and customers, for mobile users, and for downstream SSO back to on-premise applications. Formerly, we referred to this market segment as “Cloud User and Access Management”.
• IDaaS B2E: IDaaS focused on providing Identity Provisioning and Access Governance for on-premise environments, commonly complemented by Identity Federation capabilities and, based on these, at least baseline support for Single Sign-On to cloud services. These services provide a significantly stronger level of integration back to on-premise environments and should deliver Access Governance capabilities, in contrast to IDaaS SSO solutions. A significant portion of these offerings is delivered in Managed Service deployment models, in contrast to full SaaS models. B2E stands for Business-to-Employee, providing functionality focused on employee-centric IAM, but delivered from the cloud. Formerly, we referred to this market segment as “Cloud IAM & IAG”.
• IDaaS Digital: This is a rather new segment, with “Digital” standing for solutions that support the emerging requirements organizations are facing in the Digital Transformation. Such solutions must provide strong support for both customers and business partners and should support more complex interaction and functionality, which can include IoT (Internet of Things) support, secure information sharing capabilities, and others.

All three market segments are covered in separate Leadership Compass documents. Mid-term, we expect to see some convergence. However, there will remain vendors focusing only on certain of these markets, e.g. delivering Cloud SSO capabilities for SMBs or at a departmental level, in contrast to the enterprise-level solutions required for both IDaaS B2E and IDaaS Digital.