Okta, Ping Identity, CyberArk & Oracle Lead the IDaaS Omdia Universe

Omdia recently published its "Omdia Universe: Identity-as-a-Service Solution, 2023." Omdia’s purpose through this Universe research is to help technology decision-makers take informed, balanced, and smart decisions so that they can best utilize and benefit from the myriad of IDaaS products that exist. In turn, Omdia wants to help technology vendors further understand their position in the market and how they can better address the needs of users and anticipate the technology disruption of the future.

Enterprises are increasingly employing cloud-based, or at least hybrid, environments that integrate optimally with cloud-based systems. Enterprises should consider whether cloud-based identity could be deployed more quickly and help reduce costs around scalability. Cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications have transformed the business world. Omdia predicts that about four-fifths of enterprises will embrace SaaS by 2023. The identity-as-a-service (IDaaS) segment is the natural evolution of on-premises identity and access management (IAM).

The cloud was a natural place for this "vanilla" IAM to migrate to, enabling the technology to move from product to service and from capex to opex. It also broadened the market beyond large enterprises that could afford on-premises IAM to the midsize and even small and midsize business (SMB) segments. Large corporates, meanwhile, could use it to address the challenges of mergers and acquisitions, integrating companies they had acquired more easily and quickly than when they had to add all the new employees to the on-premises IAM directory.

IDaaS should be considered as an opportunity to streamline IAM and provide an enterprisewide approach that grants access to on-premises and cloud-based assets, such as data and applications. In recent years, the number of identity management vendors offering fully featured IDaaS has grown, as IDaaS specialists that started out delivering cloud-only products have challenged the incumbent IAM vendors, for whom IDaaS is a natural extension of their core identity portfolios.

To best support our objective of guiding technology decision-makers, the report looks at a broad set of solution capabilities offered by six vendors: Cross Identity, CyberArk, IBM, Okta, Oracle, and Ping Identity. To garner customer insights, Omdia did a customer survey as well as partnered with software review site TrustRadius to support and further inform this report and provide relevant insights from customer reviews. Omdia thus creates a balanced and enhanced picture to inform and advise decision makers about the end-user experience with products from the six vendors we evaluated. Omdia choose Trust Radius as the most trusted review site for business technology, used by more than 1 million buyers each month and optimized for content quality and data integrity.

CyberArk, Okta, and Ping Identity retained their leadership positions from the previous report, and Oracle improved its challenger classification to be recognized as a market leader for the first time. IBM Security remained a challenger, and Cross Identity was featured in the report for the first time. The following section below provides the ranking for each vendor in our IDaaS Omdia Universe. There is also a brief description why each vendor has been classified based on various categories:

IDaaS Leaders

Okta is a leader in the IDaaS Omdia Universe. Okta was strongest in the capability dimension, product experience, customer recommendation, and market presence.

Ping Identity also ranks as a leader in this report. Ping Identity’s strongest categories were the solution capability dimension, in product experience, and in customer recommendation.

CyberArk is also ranked as a leader in this report. CyberArk’s strongest categories were solution capability, product experience, and recommendation.

Oracle is classified as a leader, an improvement in the last version of this report in 2021. Oracle’s strongest categories were solution capability, customer recommendation, solution breadth, and product experience.

IDaaS Challengers

IBM continued to be a challenger although it improved its overall position. The company was strongest in the categories of solution capability, product experience, and customer recommendation.

Cross Identity is a challenger, and this is the first time they are featured in this report. Cross Identity’s strongest categories were solution capability, strategy and road map, solution breadth, and customer recommendation.

Omdia's Other Vendors to Watch

Microsoft declined to be included in this IDaaS Omdia Universe due to the timing of its announcement of net-new features within the Microsoft Entra product family. However, Omdia considered it imperative to include a profile of the company's identity offering due to its size and influence on this market.

Microsoft has long seemed to play the role of "sleeping giant" in the identity market. While it never competed in the on-premises IAM market per se, nor indeed in privileged access management (PAM), its huge presence in the corporate directory sector with its Active Directory product gave it a commanding view of developments in the field. This positioned it to expand its activities, particularly as cloud computing grew as the new paradigm for enterprise IT, and in this context, the launch of the cloud-based version of the directory — Azure AD — in 2000 was a key development. Since then, the vendor has dramatically expanded its offerings in the broader identity market.

At the start of June 2022, just before RSAC 2022, Microsoft announced a new product family, Microsoft Entra, which encompasses all of Microsoft's identity and access capabilities. Microsoft Entra products include:

Category Definitions

Market leaders: This category represents the leading solutions that Omdia believes are worthy of a place on most technology short lists. The vendors have established a commanding market position with products that are widely accepted as best of breed.

Market challengers: The solutions in this category have a good market positioning, and the vendors are selling and marketing the product well. The products offer competitive functionality and a good price-performance proposition, and they should be considered as part of the technology selection.