I don't think it's designed as a competitor to AD, but rather to smooth the AD-cloud user transition, especially as more and more companies buy into SaaS like O

I don't think it's designed as a competitor to AD, but rather to smooth the AD-cloud user transition, especially as more and more companies buy into SaaS like O365/GApps, etc. You are right about SAML of course, but my point is how the lines between SSO/SAML etc and AD/LDAP etc are getting blured because companies want them to essentially work as a single unit. Here are a couple of the interesting alternatives in the arena: https://github.com/apereo/cas https://github.com/apereo/cas https://www.univention.com/products/ucs/ https://www.univention.com/products/ucs/ https://www.shibboleth.net/ https://www.shibboleth.net/ https://wso2.com/ https://wso2.com/ One of my planned side projects is to test each of these.