Ping Identity Blog

New Windows IWA Integration Kit v2.1 - Available for Download

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 09:27:58 -0600

We released a new version of our popular Windows IWA Integration Kit. This is the integration kit that allows companies to leverage their Windows authentication for use in SAML or WS-Federation single sign-on.

New features in this release include:

· Improved Kerberos/NTLM fallback authentication

· Improved NTLM support for multiple domains

· Improved logging and exception handling

· Simplified adapter configuration

· Added support for Microsoft Vista Internet Explorer 7

You can download the new kit from our website at www.pingidentity.com.

185 Internet SSO Connections! WOW

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 12:47:15 -0600

One of our customers just reported that they are now at 185 connections through PingFederate and growing. That's the largest number of production SAML SSO connections to customers/partners I've heard of to date. Very impressive.

$55,000 Commission Check!!

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 15:14:41 -0600

I just signed a $55k commission check to one of our partners who sold PingFederate to a customer in Europe. I love writing these checks, it's a win for everyone as far as I'm concerned.

We've got an even larger check going out to a company that did nothing more than refer us to a customer. Not a bad day's pay for what amounts to a simple referral!

Failing from the word GO

Wed, 2 Jul 2008 11:15:36 -0600

At the Burton Catalyst conference last week, there was a fair amount of talk about failed provisioning and IdM projects. So much so, it prompted me to post an observation.

Many large projects fail to achieve their initial definition of success, not just IdM projects. But we appear to have more than our share of failures. If a customer doesn't take the time to understand the problem enough such that they can define a practically achievable solution, vendors will take advantage of them.

Many centralized strategies, nearly by virtue of their large and complex scope, fail to ever realize their initial definition of success. When is the last time someone defined success in a provision project to simply connecting two data-repositories? These centralized strategies are often not done until everything is centralized, and that's nearly impossible to achieve in today's large and dynamic enterprise environment.

And here is where the vendor community, especially the large suite vendors, combined with the integrator channel, exasperate the problem. If a vendors route to a customer is through an integrator who adds-value by unraveling complex products, someone who is responsible to make all the complexity work, then why would that vendor feel compelled to make their software easier to install, integrate and use? After all, they rely upon their channel partner to make it all work for them?

And if your sales organization is motivated to sell larger and larger deals, or worse yet, enterprise-wide licenses, then there is a motivation to cover more use-cases (instead of making existing ones easier to implement), and so vendors build larger and larger products, which of course are even more complex. It's all fine if someone else can make your complicated product work, but what if they can't? And when success in implementation is defined in years, what are the odds that the person responsible for starting a project is actually still around to see the project completed?

Maintaining quality and simplicity as use-cases grow is a real challenge for vendors. Maintaining achievable scope for customers is similarly challenging, but a requirement if expectations are to be met. Selecting an architectural approach which rewards quick, tactical wins on the way towards larger strategic objects can help, and that's one of the benefits of the federated identity (decentralized) approach. Customers can celebrate a win one connection at a time.

PingFederate Users Manuals - New Download Page

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 09:21:13 -0600

We love being an open company, and we're constantly working to provide more value to our customers and prospects. As of this morning, all of our PingFederate and PingFederate Web Services user manuals and documentation are now available for FREE & IMMEDIATE DOWNLOAD (PDF format). Enjoy

Over 100 SaaS & BPO Providers Choose Ping!

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 14:01:55 -0600

We announced today that over 100 SaaS and BPO providers have selected Ping to secure their Internet SSO requirements.

Complete Release

“Enterprises are beginning to require identity and active directory integration with their SaaS providers. Recognizing this, we've worked closely with the SaaS community to provide the identity federation and Internet single sign-on solutions their enterprise customers are demanding," said Ping Identity CEO Andre Durand. "Today, more than half of our existing SaaS customers have joined the SaaS Partner Program, further validating the use of standards and SAML as the security protocol of choice when it comes to Internet single sign-on."

We got some great quotes from our partners.

“Ping Identity allows us to meet our customers’ requirements for industry-proven SSO solutions that scale quickly and easily as their access requirements change and grow,” said Rideau Director of Infrastructure Technology Daniel Guerard. “The program aligns perfectly with our business model, creating an additional revenue stream with little to no upfront costs.”

“Joining the Ping Identity SaaS Partner Program was a no brainer,” said WageWorks Principal Architect James Yang. “Many of our customers today expect standards-based single sign-on access to work with our applications. The Ping Identity SaaS Partner Program allows us to easily provide customers with the industry’s most trusted SSO solution.”

"The Ping Identity SaaS Partner Program maps nicely to our sales model,” said Axentis CTO Dean Baumann. “The program allows us to easily provide customers with the industry’s most trusted SSO solution.”

“Partnering with Ping Identity to offer standards-based single sign-on is a win-win for PriceMetrix and our clients,” said J. Cory Weech, Vice President, Technology, CISO, PriceMetrix. “In addition to simplifying access to our ValueOne practice management toolset for investment professionals, we can also help our clients address their SSO requirements with PingFederate.”

SignOn.com now a Demo for PingFederate's "Auto-Connect"

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 06:48:15 -0600

A few months back, we added PingFederate to SignOn.com, giving the service basic SAML single sign-on capabilities. One of the reasons we did this was that we wanted to make it easier for people to demonstrate Auto-Connect, a feature built into PingFederate which eliminated the need for manual SAML configuration. In the past month, we've worked to complete that demonstration, which can now be found at http://autoconnect.pingidentity.com.

Instructions

Step 1: Go to SignOn.com and create an account.

Step 2: Enable Google Apps for your account via My Account (more details here. This will give you an email address e.g. joe@signon.com.

Step 3: Go to http://autoconnect.pingidentity.com, type in your SignOn.com email address and click ‘Sign In’. You will be redirected to SignOn.com for authentication and then SSO to autoconnect.pingidentity.com.

For all the technical background, Ashish has written up full details here.

Ping Identity Wins Morgan Stanley CTO Summit Award

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 05:20:51 -0600

Not that we don’t appreciate awards, but we haven't spent much time pursuing them. That said, when a customer like Morgan Stanley, at an internal event, selects you and your product as helping to transform their business, and prior winners include VMware (2005 winner), and you are the only one selected out of some 200 companies that year, well, that's special. Only 5 companies have ever received this award.

Every year, Morgan Stanley receives 200 applications from companies to present at the Morgan Stanley CTO Summit. We presented back in 2006. A year or so later, Morgan Stanley became a customer, using our technology to secure and integrate their employees use of on-demand applications such as Salesforce.com.

With respect to the award, Morgan Stanley internally votes on which of those 200 companies get to present and then sends out only 36 invites. Of these 36, only four (roughly 12% ever go to contract) and of those, only one receives this award. The award is given to those companies that provide innovation that holds the potential to transform their business into the future. On a more personal note, it's great to finally see federation receive the recognition it deserves for enabling companies to secure their virtual borders, especially in an era where SaaS is the new delivery platform for enterprise applications. Thank you Morgan Stanley for giving Ping the opportunity to work with you. Thank you Ping Identians for building and supporting such a stellar product.

After receiving the award, Patrick Harding, Ping's CTO had a photo opp with Jonathan Saxe, Managing Director, Global Chief Information Officer of Morgan Stanley

Loving our Customers Loving Us

Mon, 9 Jun 2008 13:45:43 -0600

I love getting emails like this from our customers. This one came in this morning.

"We’re currently setting up our PingFederate environment, things are going well. Since we announced the introduction of federation services, my phone won’t stop ringing ;-)

...As we said last time you were here, we’re interested in a more strategic, long-term alignment with you, not just a customer and vendor relationship."

Ping Goes Virtual

Mon, 9 Jun 2008 12:52:59 -0600

We call it swarm. It's our new engineering methodology which takes Agile development to the next level by removing geography from the equation. I credit the idea from a good friend, who's actually moved beyond even 'swarm' to the ultimate form of virtualization. More on that later.

Suffice it to say, Ping engineers are now swarming in and out of Ping, many times virtually. They sync, then work, then sync, then work. It's really cool to watch, and it's a new world within Engineering here at Ping. The new program goes quite nicely with our MacBook Pro handouts this past year, the only problem being, I now have a bunch of unused 30" Cinema displays here at the office most days, and I likely need to buy additional 30" displays for people to take home. All of this comes in a nick of time with gas exceeding $4/gallon.

There's not doubt that removing geography from the work-force equation holds incredible potential for gains in efficiency and productivity. Not only can you now hire the best (no matter where they live), but you can also remove the time and expense associated with costly travel, improving quality of life and reducing stress while allowing your people to achieve greater balance between family and work.

We recently had one of our engineers move to Estonia, to realize a dream of European travel and adventure while working for Ping. Matt Peterson arrived in Estonia a week or so ago. He's not on sabbatical, he's swarming. Here are a few pictures from his first week.

#2

Wed, 4 Jun 2008 14:48:07 -0600

I did a 65 mile bike ride last Sunday with 7,000 of my closest friends. Today I got an email listing highlights and photos and noticed they placed me #2 in their photo journal of the event. I can’t figure out why?

Now only if I were #2 in the race instead of #2222.

Rock'n As-Is

Mon, 2 Jun 2008 19:43:52 -0600

I invited a bunch of Ping customers to our advisory board meeting at the SSO Summit in July.

One of them responded. "I’d love to but, I think the product pretty much rocks as is, and I’m on vacation with the family."

Have a great vacation. We'll keep rock'n.

Out with the Old

Mon, 2 Jun 2008 12:22:38 -0600

Last week we had our third customer (a Fortune 100 company) tell us they've given up on their monolithic centralized WAM strategy for SSO. Instead, they're moving entirely to the loosely coupled approach of federation and PingFederate for their SSO needs.

One of the benefits of federation is the expectations for success are often aligned with a single connection. How do you climb mountains? One step at a time. I like this trend.

Rocky Mountain High

Mon, 2 Jun 2008 10:09:02 -0600

What comes to mind when you think of Colorado?

Here a Ping, we proudly call Colorado home (along with Boston, Vancouver and the UK – but those are another blog post), so I thought I would take a moment to clear up come common misconceptions:

- We do not ride our horses to work everyday. Only Friday is designated as "Ride Trigger to Work Day".

- We do not listen to John Denver at parties. That is reserved for private time at home, maybe singing "Sunshine On My Shoulders" in the shower.

- We are not all Bronco fans. Some of us are fans of the Colorado Avalanche, Colorado Rockies, Denver Nuggets, Colorado Crush, Colorado Mammoth, Colorado Outlaws or Colorado Rapids. Yes, that makes 8 professional sports teams!

- We are not all Birkenstock wearing Hippy wannabe's. That is reserved for those who attended the University of Colorado and could never bring themselves to leave Boulder.

A few cool things to come out of Colorado recently:

- Crocs - Who doesn't need a pair of pink rubber shoes with big holes?

- Chipotle - If not in your town yet, my condolences.

- The Fray - Although I must admit, if I hear "How to Save a Life" one more time, the radio is going out the window!

- Ping Identity - If you’re into that seamless SSO solutions sort of thing.

Colorado is truly a spectacular place to live or visit. But don't just take my word for it...

Come see for yourself and while you're at it, come see us at the first ever Single SignOn Summit taking place in Keystone Colorado on July 23-25 (www.ssosummit.com). I look forward to seeing you there!

Yours truly,

Andre Durand

Next Ping Bash - Burton Catalyst After Hours

Tue, 27 May 2008 14:01:43 -0600