I’ve often posted about a company saying that they’re in a space that is hot right now. It seems that in all directions competition is hotting up and things are getting busier. Single sign-on is one of these areas – from big vendor products like Novell Securelogin, to products from startups like OneLogin (hej Thomas) to the much more consumer orientated plays like LastPass (a product I couldn’t do without), everyone is jostling for position in an identity world grown ever more complex.
Passlogix isn’t a newcomer to this space, first founded in 1996 they’re focused on SSO services for the enterprise and have around 25 million users to show for it. Their v-GO product covers both on-premises and SaaS services within an enterprise. With v-GO, networks admins can:
- Require stronger passwords to authenticate to any or all applications
- Require user reauthentication to select applications, via Windows login or second factor authentication
- Prevent password sharing by using passwords that the end user is blind to
- Stop application access by ex-employees via automated password changes
- Create a full audit trail of all application access
Passlogix realizes that it needs to play well with the cloud – by their own admission over 75% of their customers now include web applications among those for which v-GO recognizes and responds to password requests. But (and this is a big but if Passlogix are truly shooting for a cloud world), their product only works in a WIndows based environment. While it’s probably fair to say that the majority of enterprises targeted by Passlogix are Windows shops, there are parallel trends occuring – one is the move to online applications that solve a point problem and give some autonomy to individual business units outside of IT. The second parallel trend is a move towards more autonomy in terms of hardware choice – many nterprises are giving users a laptop budget and allowing them to buy whatever they want – in a world such as this, Passlogix’s Windows-only approach simply doesn’t work.
Passlogix has a large installed base for sure, but then again so did DEC once upon a time. If you believe, as I do, hat the world is moving to the cloud, it’s not hard to see the Passlogix approach going the way of the dinosaurs sometime soon.
