CSO

I agree with your statements regarding the tectonic changes occurring in the enterprise. I believe that whether anyone is ready to admit it yet, the meaning of enterprise IT is changing in the form of evaporation. More and more services are turning into subscriptions of which the oft-touted Salesforce.com is only one. It isn't unusual for even a medium-sized organization to have a dozen or more external service providers and destinations that their employees visit either as pure business applications or other benefits related applications around healthcare, 401k plans, etc. Many of these application relationships to the employee (i.e. user) survive the employer-employee relationship.

Consequently, I believe that over time the idea of an "enterprise login" or an "enterprise credential" will disappear. This won't happen overnight and probably not even in the next couple of years. It is coming and I believe the groundwork for it becoming feasible and acceptable from a manageability and security standpoint is being laid by these types of deals along with the recent Microsoft acquisition of Credentica.

Identity is front burner now and combined with the SaaS-dominated world into which we move, will stay front-burner on the development front. Unfortunately on the delivery front, few seem ready to move forward with innovative credential issuing services for the masses as vendors still focus on "enterprise platforms". I guess we'll have to wait a bit longer till the term "enterprise" gets even dimmer and hard to define any longer.