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VMware's got SaaS – and you – surrounded with SSOaaS

That's Single Sign On as a Service from the cloud, to your mobe, and in IBM+Apple's face

VMware's ever-expanding end-user computing and cloud portfolios have embiggened, again, with the advent of a new single sign-on product called VMware Identity Manager.

Stay awake there, you at the back. Yes, you the one rolling your eyes because single sign-on's been done to death a hundred different ways, some of them by VMware.

Virtzilla insists things are different this time around because its Single Sign On as-a-Service – SSOaaS for acronym-lovers – can be done from the cloud and is said to be able to manage just anything? Signing on to vCloud Air and its subsidiary services? Tick! Office 365? Tick! Mobile apps like salesforce that you access through an enterprise account? Tick! Virtzilla reckons, by the way, that that last tick is in a box only it can tick.

Virtzilla also needs you to tick plenty of boxes in its product range to get you signing into salesforce or Dropbox for business, because all of this lovely stuff won't work unless your device is “managed” by its very own AirWatch enterprise mobility management (EMM) suite. Which is also available in cloudy or on-prem incarnations.

VMware's also shaking its fist at the IBM/Apple business-apps-on-fondleslabs-real-soon-now alliance with what it's calling “a 'single-touch' configured solution, for a wide variety of apps”. The idea here is that VMware wants to bundle up common apps in its various wares, so that vertical industries that want to go mobile can buy one thing (we dare not use the s-word twice) and get themselves out and about quickly.

Greasing the wheels and/or skids of these efforts is an expanded membership roster for ACE – the App Configuration for Enterprise effort. ACE who? We asked too: the outfit launched in March this year with Virtzilla, Cisco, Box, Salesforce,Workday and Xamarin aboard, all sharing a mission to create a standard so that mobile apps can be managed by any EMM tool, instead of EMM vendors having to cook up proprietary wrappers. ACE yesterday announced 15 new members and reckons its efforts will help businesses by letting them run multiple EMM solutions, or just deploy them more quickly because apps will be ready for the embrace of management.

The new crop of ACE signatories isn't full of household names – Dropbox and EMC's Syncplicity are the biggies – but the new crop does mean the effort has 21 members. Gloriously absent is Citrix, which has single sign-on wares of its own and has had for some time. ®

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