An important milestone just got passed by Google – one of the big enterprise identity management vendors out there – Quest Software (full disclosure: I am working for the company) – has added Google Apps as a directory to which they can provision identities and access.

One might argue that this is a small thing considering that Quest is by far not the first vendor to enter Google’s ecosystem. Google Solutions Marketplace lists a few hundred solutions and services around Google Apps and Enterprise Search.

However, Quest is the first among the big systems management (Quest, HP, CA, BMC, Symantec) and identity management (Quest, Oracle, Sun, Novell) vendors to get in there and this is a very important milestone for Google’s acceptance in the enterprise.

Technically, what Quest did was adding a Google Apps “connector” into their identity management and provisioning platform – ActiveRoles Server. This is an AD-centric platform which helps enterprises keep all their systems in-sync with Active Directory and automates the necessary identity management operations (provision or deprovision access, invoke associated approval workflows, check relevant policies and so on). Here’s a quick graphics from their whitepaper:

Obviously similar functionality is provided by Quest for multiple other enterprise platforms ranging from mainframes to Lotus Notes. Now Google Apps is one of them. Google becoming just yet another enterprise platform people want to get integrated with Active Directory, HR databases and their identity management systems. Boring. For Google, obviously, in a good way.