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What’s Changed: Gartner’s 2015 Identity and Access Management as a Service (IDaaS) Magic Quadrant

2015 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Identity and Access Management as a Service

2015 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Identity and Access Management as a ServiceEditor’s Note: The 2016 IDaaS Magic Quadrant is out and available here.

Editor’s Note: The IDaaS MQ Report is no longer a yearly publication. For more on IDaaS, check out the Kuppingercole Leadership Compass – IDaaS: Single Sign-On to the Cloud and The Forrester Wave: Identity-As-A-Service Q4 2017.

Analyst house Gartner has released the latest iteration of its annual Identity and Access Management-as-a-Service (IDaaS) Magic Quadrant (MQ) report.

In the 2015 MQ for IDaaS Gartner evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of 15 vendors that it considers most significant in the IDaaS market, and provides readers with a graph (the Magic Quadrant) plotting the vendors based on their ability to execute and their completeness of vision. The graph is divided into four quadrants: niche players, challengers, visionaries, and leaders. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product, or service depicted in its research publications.

[ Related: The Gartner Magic Quadrant for Security Event and Information Management (SIEM) ]

This is the second iteration of the IDaaS MQ report after the Gartner introduced the category in 2014, and it comes at a turbulent time, as the still-nascent IDaaS market is thrust into mainstream IT consciousness by a series of highly public data breaches that have sent CIOs scrambling to find new ways to secure their information. Gartner predicts that by 2019, 25% of Identity and Access Management (IAM) purchases will use the IDaaS delivery model.

At Solutions Review, We read the 38 Page report, available to Gartner subscribers here or as a free download here, and pulled a few of what we considered the most important takeaways nd key changes since the 2014 IDaaS MQ.


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What is IDaaS? 

According to Gartner, “a vendor in the identity and access management as a service (IDaaS) market delivers a predominantly cloud-based service in a multi-tenant or dedicated and hosted delivery model that brokers core identity governance and administration (IGA), access and intelligence functions to target systems on customers’ premises and in the cloud.”

The 2015 IDaaS MQ report rates vendors on the ability to be “general purpose” identity and access management (IAM) service providers with a variety of use cases; in order to be ranked, vendors must have functionality in IGA, access, and identity log monitoring and reporting.

The 2015 IDaaS Magic Quadrant, Courtesy of Centrify. Click to enlarge.

The 2015 IDaaS Magic Quadrant, Courtesy of Centrify.

Cloud Service Providers Enter Market in Strong Standing; Acquisitions by legacy vendors raise the level of competition. 

Just as we predicted in our article, Four Predictions for the 2015 IDaaS Magic Quadrant, one of the largest changes affecting the IDaaS market in 2015 is the recent entry of major legacy and cloud players into the market.

Both Microsoft (Azure AD) and Salesforce (Salesforce Identity) have entered the market with full-fledged IDaaS offerings in the last year, and both jumped to the top corner of the ‘visionaries’ quadrant, with Microsoft’s Azure Active Directory (AD) solutions ranked highest out of all 15 vendors for completeness of vision.

Other large companies such as IBM and RSA have also entered the market through acquisitions.

Large companies such as Microsoft and Salesforce have a significant advantage in the market, due to their ability to leverage existing sales channels and customer bases, and their ability to place commoditization pressure on the market by including their IDaaS functionality in their main platform as a service (PaaS) offerings, says Gartner.

Gartner predicts that by 2019, 40 percent of IDaaS revenue will accrue to PaaS vendors. That’s up from just five percent in 2014.


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Gartner’s ‘Leaders’ Field Thins as IDaaS Market Diversifies and Requirements Remain Stringent

In 2014, the ‘leaders’ quadrant of Gartner’s graph featured three vendors: Okta, Ping Identity, and Covisint. Flash forward to 2015, and only Okta remains, with both Ping Identity and especially Covisint docked considerable points on ‘ability to execute’ and now dipping into the ‘visionaries’ quadrant. So, what happened?

Looking at the 2015 MQ, it’s apparent that there’s been a considerable consolidation of vendors into the ‘visionaries’ quadrant, which leads me to believe that, contrary to my prediction that specialized vendors moving upmarket would be ranked higher in the quadrant, Gartner is in fact punishing specialized, web-centric vendors for lacking broad functionality.

I found that Gartner lowered the ‘ability to execute’ standing of several premier web-centric IDaaS vendors for what Gartner called “shallow functionality,” especially in regards to IGA. For example, both Centrify, who Gartner called “the best” in enterprise mobility management (EMM), and Ping Identity, who, as Gartner notes in the report, has “strong leadership in identity standards development,” lost points due to lacking IGA capabilities.

Web-Centric IDaaS Leads in Customer Acquisition. 

As noted in my predictions article, many of the top players in the IDaaS market, such as Okta, Ping Identity, and Onelogin, have built their businesses by snapping up customers at the lower end of the market and selling IDaaS solutions with deep but specialized functionality, and now those vendors are moving up market.

Gartner estimates that 85% of client interaction on the topic of IdaaS “indicates a need for web-centric solutions…” for a variety of applications.

However, as web-centric vendors move up market, Gartner warns that they will need broader functionality, specifically in the realm of IGA, in order to handle the complicated needs of larger organizations.

You can get the report in full from Okta here, or Gartner subscribers can view the report in full here

You can also download the Forrester Wave Identity-as-a-Service Q4 2017 and KuppingerCole Leadership Compass—IDaaS: Single Sign-On to the Cloud


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