SAP Ventures invests in Imprivata

Imprivata plans to improve its market positioning with the fresh money. SAP Ventures is, besides Imprivata, invested in Ping Identity, one of the leading-edge vendors in the Federation market segment.

With focus on Imprivata, the investment proves the strong position the vendor has achieved during the last few years in the E-SSO market.

Even while we see still room for improvement Product Report Imprivata OneSign 4.0 especially around the area of physical/logical convergence we rate Imprivata amongst the leading-edge vendors in E-SSO.

SAP Ventures, on the other hand, claims to be independent in its investments but on the other hand facilitates interaction between the companies they have invested in and the SAP ecosystem.

Even while Imprivata might be a high potential investment from a financial perspective, it raises the question what SAP has in mind beyond this financial investment. The fact that SAP has neither E-SSO nor Federation in its portfolio and that it has invested in Ping and Imprivata is at least noteworthy. We don't necessarily expect an expanded investment or takeover of these companies by SAP but at least it looks like SAP is securing its claims in the Authentication and Access Management field.

On the short term, the investment strengthens the position of Imprivata, being still a start-up but with a much stronger backing from one of world's leading software vendors. Thus, Imprivata is more likely to be on the shortlist in E-SSO product decisions than before.