Normally, my goal with this space is to write about Austin-area companies that are intriguing, but maybe not “on the radar” yet. But, I’m cheating a bit this time, by writing about Conformity. I met Scott Bils, its founding CEO, more than three years ago when we were both laboring away at ventures – me in services, he in software – that were focused on helping companies in the post-Sarbanes Oxley regulatory world.

Scott’s firm at the time eventually retrenched to focus on older, core businesses leaving Scott to consider making the leap to running his own venture, which ultimately became Conformity, Inc. While the actual software product being brought to market has gone through some evolution, as all good new ideas invariably do, the kernel of the idea was and is as sound as ever, in my opinion.

That kernel: as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications continue along the road of increasing adoption in ever larger enterprises – both commercial and public sector – the need to manage them efficiently (“dress them up” so to speak) becomes increasingly critical, in order to optimize total costs and ensure compliance.

The not-so-dirty-little secret, as anyone who has licensed SaaS applications for the enterprise knows, is that while on demand may sound like “you pay for just what you want, when you want it,” in practice it is often a little less flexible. In fact, while practices amongst enterprise SaaS vendors vary, the truth is that pricing and other terms are negotiable and may require purchases in blocks of licenses and/or multi-year commitments of usage. This isn’t a bad thing for SaaS adoption…the smarter, large enterprises can use their size to negotiate good deals.

However, what it does mean is that the projected total cost of ownership (TCO) and actual TCO of SaaS applications can vary (possibly by a lot!), if the investment isn’t fully deployed, actively managed, and periodically audited – throughout the life of the license. This is where a management application like Conformity comes in. I’ll highlight just a couple of the capabilities that make it valuable.

User provisioning – Conformity provides a centralized point of provisioning and de-provisioning of users’ accounts within cloud applications, and ongoing management of user permissions and authorizations.

Anyone that has used Salesforce.com knows that, while sales people may come and go, the obligation for that seat of your Salesforce.com license often stays. You want to be able to quickly provision accounts for new people (and unused seats) consistently, reliably, and cost-effectively

Role and profile management – Conformity enables organizations to centrally manage SaaS application roles, profiles and permissions through permission models and to map policies to users and roles. Why this matters is, in addition to coming and going, people also move around in large organizations and the companies themselves re-org.

Imagine running an all SaaS applications infrastructure when a new Administration takes office in Washington, much less when a new CEO takes over at GM or Yahoo. Again, being able to centrally manage roles and profile across multiple SaaS applications can save significant time and money, as well as avoiding accidental access to information, when someone who shouldn’t have permission to data retains it.

Conformity is one of an emerging class of enterprise software providers that is making SaaS applications more acceptable to the wants and needs of large organizations. I’ve written about others in this class as well, like the team from Socialware, who are tackling different but equally important aspects of the enterprise 2.0 management challenge. And, at nGenera (my day job), as a necessary part of our collaboration platform, we have built a services layer that we can deploy for large enterprises, as well.

I recently attended the inaugural Government 2.0 Summit by O’Reilly Media, that was a broader-based version of other Government 2.0 programs that have been underway for a couple of years. But, the main take-away was undeniably that the federal government is rapidly moving to a SaaS philosophy. Under the Obama administration, and with point-man CIO Vivek Kundra, there have been a series of announcements, including Data.gov, Recovery.gov, and most recently Apps.gov (last week).

The message is clear: SaaS apps, even for an enterprise with the security, reliability, and privacy needs of the US Federal government, are the future. And companies like Conformity are helping to figure out how to do it.