Friday, 8 August 2008
Ping Globe Trotters
PingIdentians are spreading out all over the globe.
Jackson Shaw review of the SSO Summit
Jackson Shaw of Quest Software literally climbed mountains to attend the SSO Summit in Keystone this year. He does a nice job with a review of the event on his blog. Participation by companies such as Quest Software, and their customers is critical to the success of any industry event, so I really appreciate both his participation and his kind words.
I especially appreciated these comments.
"All of the presentations on Day 2 were awesome and I must say I especially liked the customer presentations and the fact there were a lot of customers presenting. To me, this makes it all worthwhile.
and
"p.s. I'll be back next year!"
Wednesday, 6 August 2008
Time's fun when you're having flies
It's been 6 years since Ping Identity was started with my old friends, Bryan Field-Elliot, Eric Norlin (now Defrag) and an investment from Phil Becker. I just discovered this photo tonight. I didn't even remember it existed. Gosh I look young here. The photo is of the first $100k that started Ping Identity. A lot of water, coffee, sweat, tears and good times have since passed under this bridge.
Mr. X Kudo's for Ping Support
I've received a number of unsolicited customer kudo's recently. In my experience, people are quick to call out the mistakes, but rarely if ever go out of their way to tell you your doing something right. Which makes the below email that much more special. I've changed the gentleman's name and company to avoid needing corporate approval to reproduce the email.
-------
My name is
We are currently working on a project to enable SSO between
However, I wanted to let you know what a great job Mark did for us. He was very helpful in providing troubleshooting assistance while we were trying to determine what the issues were. He was a wealth of knowledge for us, not only in dealing with the PingFederate product and our implementation, but also regarding SAML in general. Even as it was clear that the problem was on the web application provider's end, Mark still made himself available to us for whatever we needed. It was frustrating for all of us (including Mark), but he did a great job supporting us.
Many vendors would have walked away from the issue once it was clear that the problem lay elsewhere. Mark did not. He knew that we needed help, and he did all that he could to help us lead the application vendor where they needed to go to get things working. He went above and beyond for
Regards,

Mr X., CISSP, CISA
Associate Director, Global IT Security
Ping's Shiny New Digs - Waltham Boston
Ping has new offices in Boston. Our shiny new digs are now at 1000 Winter Street.
A change, especially up, is always nice, but I miss the days when Ping fit neatly into a single 10x10 office across the kitchen from my old Jabber offices 6 years ago.
Monday, 4 August 2008
Dave Kearns (Network World) on the SSO Summit
I pulled a few quotes from a post Dave Kearns made this morning on his experiences surrounding the SSO Summit.
"The attendance was small (a little over 100 attendees), but most were security and/or IT managers, execs and implementers from fairly large organizations. And all were willing to share their own experiences, and their questions, about the right path to take and the right reasons to take it for reducing the number of authentication points a user needed to see during the course of the business day."
"I did hear that some people had trouble getting their finance departments to sign off on a conference held at a ski resort, but I'll guarantee that no one went skiing. This was no junket, but a valuable learning experience."
"I should mention that the audience was very international – not usual for a “first annual” conference. I spoke with attendees from all over the U.S., Canada, the U.K., France, Germany, Australia, New Zealand and Brazil. The issues surrounding SSO, federation, governance, security, audit and other aspects of authentication are universal – the reasons why things are done (varying compliance issues, for example) differ but the mechanics of doing it are the same the whole world over."
We had a great time, and really appreciated you coming Dave!
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