I mentioned some of last week's announcements from Microsoft and Google in the last issue but there was another important one concerning Google and Ping Identity. Meanwhile, Microsoft continued to surprise me with more announcements this week surrounding Intelligent Application Gateway and Identity Lifecycle Manager.

First, the Google-related announcement which came from Ping Identity. Cloud-based computing and software-as- a-service (SaaS) are hot topics right now (see Microsoft’s announcement of Windows Azure, for example). Google Apps are right at the top of anyone’s list of SaaS offerings. But moving users to SaaS requires a good bit of heavy lifting from the IT department:
* SaaS uses an account-per-user architecture for customization, personalization, and billing.
* Administrators must create/update/delete user accounts in the SaaS provider’s directory.
* For organizations with an internal directory, SaaS doubles the administrative workload.
* No SSO (or user access at all) without accounts!
* End users expect SSO for any/all access methods.

Ping wants to help. So it has released PingConnect, a subset of the now venerable PingFederate 5.2, which is cloud-based identity for SaaS. It’s currently in a controlled release, but will soon roll out broadly. Initially it supports Google Apps and Salesforce.com but that probably represent 80% or more of the actual SaaS users so that’s no hardship. If SaaS is in your current or future gameplan you should check out PingConnect.

Continuing on the amazing announcements from Microsoft, I had the chance to chat with JG Chirapurath, director of marketing for the Identity and Security Division at Microsoft, who told me about the upcoming SP2 release of Intelligent Application Gateway (IAG). Check out the IAG page if you aren’t familiar with this secure remote-access service. IAG was previously available only as a hardware appliance from Microsoft OEM partners. This new version will be available as software only (to install on your own hardware) and in a virtualized package. But, even bigger news – it will support heterogeneous environments: Firefox browsers as well as IE, Linux & Mac desktops, in addition to Windows. Couple that with the multiprotocol Geneva Server announced last week and be amazed at how Redmond is opening up. IAG SP2 should ship before the year is out.

Dave Kearns is a consultant and editor of IdM, the Journal of Identity Management.