Identity as a Service Revisited

Forrester Research made a prediction in their Identity Management Market Forecast: 2007 to 2014 that Identity-as-a-Service (IDaaS) would be a future direction for identity management. This was published in February of 2008.

I read a post recently from Adrian Rodriguez from identropy on Integration-as-a-Service (IaaS) which said:

“In my opinion, technology has progressed from the normal implementations, to the much lesser known Identity as a Service (which was popular about a year ago but really never caught on because it is what all implementers were already doing) to Integration as a Service (which provides the greatest value and return on investment for an organization).”

Oddly enough most of the material from IDaaS was published in 2007 to early 2008 and focused on IDaaS as an architectural model for offering identity-based services in a SOA model. This one from Nishant Kaushik over at Oracle tried to clear up confusion between Identity-as-a-Service the SOA layer and also as the software on-demand or the SaaS model. And then it appears, IDaaS started going away as Rodriquez suggests. Probably because no one was able to take the SOA version beyond the relevant standards involved to actually define services.

Then this came out this year (link):

"Fischer International Identity, enabler of Managed Identity Services, was announced as the 2008 "Industry Innovator" in Identity & Access Management by SC Magazine. Fischer was recognized for their Identity as a Service (IaaS) platform that enables organizations to securely outsource user provisioning, compliance enforcement, audit reporting, privileged account management, and password management through the cloud in a SaaS model."

When reading the marketing material and the link to the original SC Magazine article it is more the SOA-version than the SaaS-version although Fisher’s product positioning uses SaaS to explain what it is. It is understandable to use SaaS to explain it to customers but does add to the confusion.

Conclusion?

• The original IDaaS was meant to be a services layer for identity information and hasn’t really gone anywhere in the last year.
• The “aaS” extention to IDaaS caused confusion in an attempt to clarify
• No one has figured out how to make money at Identity as a Service. Fisher is trying.
• Fisher puts the trademark logo on IaaS which is going to cause heartburn for identropy which has chosen to use IaaS for Integration-as-a-service.
• I will strongly resist anyone on my team or any marketing department I work with to attach “aaS” to what we do. ...Hey look it is Video-as-a-Service (aka Television). ...for lunch we're going to implement Food-as-a-Service (aka Carryout)