SAP acquires MaXware

This week SAP announced its acquisition of MaXware, a privately held identity management vendor located in Trondheim, Norway. The core of MaXware’s identity management offering is its user provisioning and virtualization capabilities.

SAP’s acquisition of MaXware has potential to impact the identity management market in several different ways such as:

• Application-centric identity management becomes a reality। Oracle’s and SAP’s IdM offering will truly have tighter integration with their respective enterprise applications. Integrating with ERP applications will be simplified.
• Identity becomes an embedded component of enterprise applications। Enterprise applications become the trigger for identity events rather than just a consumer. This has been something that Burton Group has predicted for sometime. Both SAP and Oracle have the opportunity to make this happen.
• Identity as a service। Again this is something Burton Group has been promoting. SAP has potential to influence identity as a service by combining its NetWeaver, SOA, standards, and identity strategies.
• Most obviously, SAP’s acquisition brings additional consolidation and competition to the IdM market