Last week, Salesforce announced the launch of Salesforce Identity, the company’s new cloud-based identity and access management platform that will simplify for IT administrators the process of provisioning and managing companies’ collection of mobile, cloud and on-premise applications. The tool will allow IT departments to manage any app from any device, for employees, customers and partners.

Identity and access management (IAM) is an essential component of any enterprise IT operation. While dominated by traditional players such as CA and EMC, recent trends towards the cloud have enabled niche cloud-based/SaaS IAM solutions such as OneLogin, Okta, Ping Identity, etc. to successfully raise venture capital. At the same time, offerings from larger players, such as Microsoft Azure Active Directory and Oracle Public Cloud have emerged to provide more encompassing IAM solutions across on-premise and cloud infrastructure. Salesforce Identity joins the ranks of this later group. Salesforce Identity goes well with the company’s PaaS pursuits around Heroku, Force.com etc.

Security around access and authentication is in many ways a war of attrition – continually chipping away at risks is key in this space. This in turn implies the need for connectivity between silos around policies, geographies and platforms. Further, in today’s world of the ‘Internet of Everything’, there are many businesses for which IAM constitutes just one piece of a logical layer that also interplays with Physical Security (sensors, surveillance, etc.) to accomplish what is now more generally referred to as Information Technology – Operations Technology (IT-OT) convergence. An airport, a utility, a logistics hub, a distributed enterprise, all have critical need for such a holistic converged IT-OT view (the kind offered by Opus portfolio company Alert Enterprise), for which these entities are willing to pay top dollar.

The end-game is a holistic, transparent, actionable view around enterprise access and policies. Salesforce Identity gets us further along towards this end-game, yet there is a long long way to go…