Universal Containers is implementing Salesforce Identity to broker authentication from its enterprise single sign-on (SSO)...

To broker authentication fromits enterprise SSO solution through Salesforce to third party applications using SAML, Salesforce Identity plays the role of a Service Provider (SP). A SP is an entity that relies on an Identity Provider (IdP) to authenticate and authorize users. In thisscenario, the enterprise SSO solution is the IdP, Salesforce is the SP, and the third party applications are the Resource Servers or Client Applications. The SP receives a SAML assertion from the IdP and uses it to obtain an access token from the ResourceServer or Client Application. References: SAML Single Sign-On Settings, Authorize Apps with OAuth