The news out this morning is that Ping Identity has acquired the Sxip Access product line from Sxip Identity. Before I go into what I think this means, some full disclosure is in order: I was employee #1 at Ping and maintain an equity stake; and I'm friends with both Andre Durand (Ping's CEO) and Dick Hardt (Sxip's CEO). That said, let me say that I think this acquisition actually marks a moment in time for the identity space in general.
Sxip was early into the developing market that is now widely seen as "securing SaaS applications." Their Sxip Access product line concentrated on securing access to things like Salesforce.com and Google docs at a time when most other identity companies never even considered the implications of Software as a Service.
More recently, Ping Identity has opened up a solution set for SaaS providers, and began to dedicate resources to that effort. This acquisition clearly furthers their initiatives.
Sxip Identity has simultaneously maintained a whole "identity 2.0" initiative (around OpenID, Sxipper, etc) that they're now also freed up to concentrate on.
So what, if anything, does this mean for the identity marketplace?
Broadly speaking, enterprise software is undergoing tectonic changes because of the software as a services model. Meanwhile, identity management as a space is still largely dominated by product sets that are not at ease in a SaaS architecture. I expect that to change over the next few years, as identity companies first move toward a more distributed, SOA-like approach, and eventually to SaaS models of delivery (for certain pieces). In that sense, this acquisition is representative of something happening in identity.
Securing "enterprise 2.0" (largely SaaS-driven) applications is one of the huge blind spots in that space. Something that Michael Barrett, CISO of PayPal, compared to "giving a child scissors and telling them to go run around." Moving to solve that problem is good for Ping, good for Sxip, good for CSOs everywhere, and good for identity in general.
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.