The Ping blog quotes Mike Neuenschwander of the Burton Group on whether there’s a winner-takes-all opportunity in identity management:

“Although vendors continue to approach the IdM market as a winner-take-all proposition, features of IdM make the market extremely difficult to dominate. For one thing, the resources that identity vendors aspire to control are politically fragmented, physically distributed, and technologically diverse. No vendors to date have shown the resourcefulness and the will necessary to provide sufficiently broad interoperability to manage such a wide range of resources. In fact, vendors with the most resources have little political motivation to provide IdM for legacy or competitive products, because it’s more to their benefit to replace those systems with their own.”

As an entrepreneur related to this space, I am naturally very interested in these kinds of questions. I agree with Mike’s conclusion on much simpler grounds: the market is simply too large and too important to be dominated by any one entity. Just consider the government part of identity management: the day when one country allows another country to be the official "identity provider" of their citizens will likely never come (which is probably a good thing). And that has many downstream consequences.

However, just because there is no one entity can dominate the entire market, this does not mean that there aren’t a number of winner-take-all games in subsegments of the market. I’m rather convinced that there are. In my view, it will be a sign of further maturity of this market once we collectively understand its structure and we know which subsegments exist, what the dynamics are within each segment, and how they will overlap, ignore each other or compete.