Today saw the general availability of Intel Cloud SSO, a single sign-on tool built on Salesforce.com’s Force.com platform and designed to simplify user access to cloud and SaaS applications and enhance identity and access management for the IT pro both. It may seem a strange, given Intel’s reputation as a hardware player. But it all makes perfect sense in the larger scheme.

As you may guess from the fact that it was built on Force.com, Intel Cloud SSO and Salesforce are tightly integrated to the point where you can (entirely optionally) use a Salesforce identity as that single login across platforms. There’s also an (also optional) on-premises tool for integrating Active Directory identities into the Intel platform. Outside of the Salesforce.com ecosystem, Jain says that Intel Cloud SSO supports logins for over 200 SaaS applications and counting, mainly via open login standards like SAML and OpenID.

Obviously, Intel doesn’t have the only cloud SSO product out there. But Jain says that what really sets Intel’s apart is its McAfee technology backend, a context-aware layer that can “sense” what kind of device is using the portal, and the fact that it integrates with what Intel refers to as “seamless two-factor authentication,” where the processor itself generates the unique keycode with no user intervention, a feature available in Intel’s most recent enterprise processor product line.

But that’s all just a sidenote to Intel’s real master plan here. Intel Trusted Execution Technology (TXT), the chip giant’s trusted computing play for cloud and virtual infrastructures, Intel pervasive encryption, McAfee Application Control for cloud/virtualized applications – Intel’s goal is simply to be all things cloud security to everyone, no matter which layer you’re working with.

From the processor through virtual machines through applications, Intel’s made it its mission to secure each slice of the cloud as best it can. It may seem strange, but it’s creating a complete security ecosystem that seems especially designed to assist service providers as they move up the stack from simple hosting to application delivery, where the real margins are.