Monday, 28 April 2008

Federation as Commodity

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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.