I recently read an article by Anita Moorthy, Sr.Solutions Marketing Manager for Novell, Inc.  in which she articulates the results of a survey on what organizations want when purchasing SaaS products.

It seems that the group falls into 2 categories:

• Those that want their needs met by developing capabilities in-house
  • The issue being the customers bring a variety of identity management solutions to the relationship which will require devoted development resources to a never-ending cycle of customization.
• Those that would rather someone else take care of it for them
  •  2 most popular options being OEMing through a third-party or sourcing through their hosing vendor.

She goes on to mention that Identity Management is essentially an infrastructure function. Since contemporary hosting tends to be moving towards infrastructure as a service (IaaS) it's likely these providers will have the technical know-how to integrate IaaS into there offerings and should have a definite stake in supporting it into the future.

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