Today we see two basic flavors of cloud IAM. One archetype is the model offered by Covisint, VMware Horizon, Symplified, Okta, OneLogin, etc.: these vendors provide relatively tight integration, but less capable identity services based on their respective firm's own intellectual property. Because of the above, these offerings clearly have a short implementation time. The other camp of vendors believes in providing hosted services of "legacy" IAM products: CA Technologies coming out with CloudMinder, Lighthouse adding their own IP to IBM TIM/TAM, Simeio Solutions blending OpenAM and Oracle's identity stack with their own secret sauce, and Verizon Business using NetIQ's IDM stack as a basis for their hosted offering solution.

Moving forward, we expect that the models will converge. With the adoption of cloud IAM at SMBs and enterprises, suite vendors will need to provide cloud IAM services. This will definitely lead to a surge of acquisitions of the above smaller providers (Symplified, Okta, OneLogin, etc.) in the next 12-24 months.

We are in the process of conducting a Wave on cloud IAM services. We are interested in your feedback, questions, and pressing issues around cloud IAM.