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Products

Wednesday, 30 April 2008

PingFederate 5.1 now available!

A new version of PingFederate is available for immediate download. The new version has some great new features, including simple, SAML attribute-based just-in-time provisioning, a feature many have asked for over the years. Other features include:

- Enhancement to HSM Support, encrypt/decrypt XML
- Addition of JMX support for Runtime Monitoring
- We also fixed a few security related issues identified in a recent external security review
- and lot's of other small things

You can get it now at: http://www.pingidentity.com/products/downloads.cfm

del.icio.us digg Yahoo! MyWeb Posted by adurand at 8:52 PM in IdM | Responses (0) | Permalink




Tuesday, 29 April 2008

"Piss Off"

A gentleman came by our booth at Software 2008 and asked Andrea how long it took make a federated connection. He was with a large insurance company that had 40 people dedicated to a federation project with 40 connections to make. He said they had been working on it for years.

When Andrea responded, "...less than 30 days", he replied, "...piss-off! You're kidding right? They lied to me!". We got a good laugh out of that one. Yea, we'll do it in less than 30 days. Try us.

del.icio.us digg Yahoo! MyWeb Posted by adurand at 3:58 PM in IdM | Responses (0) | Permalink




Monday, 28 April 2008

Federation as Commodity

We recently participated in what effectively amounts to a reverse auction for one company looking to federate. If you're not familiar with reverse auctions, the concept is to have vendors compete on price. Reverse actions are an interesting way to negotiate the price when all other variables are equal. This applies to well-defined goods that have reached a certain level of product and market maturity or inherently offer little room for differentiation to begin with. When this is the case, then accelerating a negotiation on price makes sense, and a reverse auction is one way to manage that process.

I was a little surprised when I heard this had happened. On the one hand, it's a good sign that people think federation has reached a level of maturity where they could apply this technique of price negotiation. But on the other hand, nothing could be farther from the truth when comparing federation software and services.

While the initial use-case of federated SSO using the SAML specification is well-known and widely supported, implementation quality, completeness, integration capabilities and flexibility of deployment vary widely between open source, stack vendor solutions and solutions from best-of-breed companies like Ping. Nearly by definition, contemplating a reverse auction for federation will most definitely land you with the solution fraught with hidden cost.

Hiding cost during the initial purchase of a project is a well known tactic often employed by those selling more complex solutions that require significant cost to integrate and operate. Ping's approach to the market couldn't be more opposed. We're all about exposing hidden costs up-front, and charging a fair price for our value in reducing complexity that overall, saves an enterprise money. Both real and perceived value are derived from an alignment of expectations. By allowing companies to download our software before speaking with a representative, we allow companies to draw their own conclusions around the value and quality of our software before any expectations are set by speaking with us.

del.icio.us digg Yahoo! MyWeb Posted by adurand at 12:10 PM in IdM | Responses (1) | Permalink




Thursday, 17 April 2008

Enabling Organizational Agility

In a recent customer meeting, our contact in Information Security had organized an audience that included a group that is responsible for translating business requirements into IT requirements, and communicating relevant cost/benefit details back into the business from IT. At many of our customers, this kind of group helps analyze the business impact of acquisitions and divestitures, as well as the cost/benefit of outsourcing non-core services.

The immediately apparent benefit (to them and us) of investing in a federated identity infrastructure (think of it as a lightweight abstracted integration layer between disparate businesses) was that they could pull time and uncertainty out of the process of putting together & pulling apart discrete businesses as the economics dictated. In other words, they need to be agile as an organization, and the federated approach Ping provides is not a nice to have, but a “must have” technology that helps them accomplish the goal of maintaining agility.

I guess this all makes sense. For organizations that grow through acquisition, or that are constantly spinning off various divisions, any time spent centralizing and consolidating your infrastructure works against the organizational mandate.

So, the question is, who performs the “Integration Services” function within any organization that is in flux (and who isn’t in flux these days)? We're working hard to uncover those groups in as many companies as possible, and to help those organizations understand the huge value-add potential from including Ping as part of their solution.

del.icio.us digg Yahoo! MyWeb Posted by adurand at 10:19 AM in IdM | Responses (0) | Permalink




Monday, 14 April 2008

Bigger

Ping had a small 10x10 booth at the RSA Security Conference last week. It's always entertaining to walk the floor and see how much money is spent on corporate puffery. As a practical matter, money spent on a show floor hardly ever makes sense from a dollars per lead analysis. Companies such as us do it only because it is a convenient way to meet face to face a number of customers, prospects and partners who'd otherwise take months to see individually. But, these people seek us out, so it doesn't really matter if we're in the back with a 10x10, or in the front with a 20x20.

Personally, I think it's smarter to have a consistent presence than to pretend to be bigger than you are. I know a number of the companies on the exhibit show floor were spending VC dollars to afford their 20x20 and I just have a hard time relying on a show floor presence being the most efficient way to generate leads. I think the war is won the 360 days you're NOT exhibiting.

That said, we had an amusing little thing happen to us. Someone wandered by our booth and when they saw the Ping logo, they stopped and paused, looking perplexed. When one of our sales team inquired, the gentleman said, "I thought you guys were bigger than that."

At first, I wasn't sure how to take that comment. But I've since decided it's really a compliment in disguise. I'm now decided we should keep our booth to 10x10, no matter how big we get. We'll spend the money we save on great software.

del.icio.us digg Yahoo! MyWeb Posted by adurand at 4:45 PM in IdM | Responses (2) | Permalink




The Identity Federation Layer

I really enjoy watching Patrick Harding (our CTO) think and work. He's got an incredible intuition for the future, and he's been honing his skills as a CTO for the past few years. As a small company amongst giants, it's important that we be ever on the lookout for what the future holds, and that we have a roadmap for getting us and our customers there safely.

Amongst other things, Patrick has developed a nice thesis on the parallels between what happened with 'the networking layer' and what will likely happen with 'the identity layer'. He writes about his ideas here.

del.icio.us digg Yahoo! MyWeb Posted by adurand at 4:30 PM in IdM | Responses (0) | Permalink




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