Intermedia acquires SaaSID

The just-announced acquisition of SaaSID by Intermedia is something that business users are likely to be seeing more of over the coming months. It is not only part of a typical pattern of rationalisation being seen in the cloud services market sector, but a mark of how the service packages available to users are becoming richer.

Identity management, SaaSID’s particular forte, plays an important role in the application of security policies and practice in IT, and in particular in cloud delivered services where the potential for un-authenticated individuals to gain access to sensitive company data is high. But it is also a specifically focussed application that some users might overlook.

It can therefore end up playing its role more effectively if it is part of a wider suite of security services, which is the case here.

It is also an example of how the cloud is providing the opportunity for sets of related, complementary applications and tools to coalesce into broader services that are, collectively easier to sell because the resultant package is more comprehensible to the end users.

This is also the case with this acquisition. Intermedia lays claim to being one of the world’s largest one-stop shops for cloud IT services and business applications. The acquisition of SaaSID provides organisations with a single point of control over employees’ access to cloud services and applications, minimising the risk of unauthorised access to sensitive data.

One obvious target is to allow companies to establish security perimeters around all their social, mobile and cloud environments, while offering employees the simplicity and ease of use of logging in only once to access all of their cloud applications.

Intermedia has long provided Single Sign On (SSO) capabilities for its Office in the Cloud suite of services. SSO is now, of course, an essential pre-requisite in modern cloud-based business environments, where users regularly work with collaborative environments covering applications such as email, file sync and share, voice, HR, accounting, CRM and more.

With the integration of SaaSID, Intermedia’s 90,000 business customers and more than 700,000 users will benefit from the simplicity and security of SSO across the entirety of their cloud and IT services. This includes not just those offered by Intermedia, but cloud services from NetSuite, QuickBooks, Salesforce, Workday and hundreds of other providers.   

SSO also benefits employees who use a large and growing number of cloud services beyond business applications. Users no longer have to remember multiple usernames and passwords, which increases productivity and significantly reduces calls to help desks. 

“With this acquisition, Intermedia continues to be a pioneer in delivering secure business applications and cloud services to its customers and to the SMB market,” said Phil Koen, Intermedia chairman and CEO. “Ed Macnair and his SaaSID team have rapidly forged a reputation as innovators in the security space. We will invest in and hasten the speed with which this ground-breaking technology is available to our customers.”

The acquisition furthers Intermedia’s vision of providing a tightly integrated business cloud solution to small and medium-sized businesses. All of Intermedia’s services are pre-integrated for a seamless user experience. They are managed via the company’s HostPilot control panel, with just one login, one password, one bill and one source of support. With the addition of SaaSID, users can extend this experience to include all of their cloud services, regardless of the provider.

Integration of the SaaSID cloud service with Intermedia is expected to be complete and ready to roll by early next year.