PingFederate 5.2 - Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound

Essentially, this release completes the integrated of the advanced provisioning and de-provisioning features we acquired from Sxip Identity for Salesforce.com and Google Apps. And marks the beginning of a whole new direction for PingFederate, namely, account lifecycle management for Enterprises looking to better secure and integrate with SaaS vendors.

We already have most of the top 100 SaaS vendors using PingFederate for Internet SSO. Now, beginning with this release, which focuses on Salesforce and Google initially, we have the foundation to provide similar provisioning services for other SaaS vendors.

For enterprises this is a big deal, as we essentially extend their pre-existing identity management activities in Active Directory (or other directory services) to now include complete identity lifecycle management and SSO to Salesforce and Google (with more SaaS vendors on their way).

Here’s the ‘official’ stuff....

According to Gartner, Inc., "Software as a service is forecast to have a compound annual growth rate of 17-percent through 2011 for small-and-midsize-business CRM, ERP and SCM software markets, more than double the growth rate for total enterprise application software as a whole.”*

“Along with the efficiencies they provide, SaaS applications can present some unique challenges to IT,” said Ping Identity CEO Andre Durand. “Because most SaaS applications have their own user directories, IT administrators may be manually adding, updating and deleting hundreds or thousands of user accounts. Ping Identity has responded with the only SaaS SSO solution that’s up and running in days, and includes automatic provisioning to eliminate that extra work.”

PingFederate 5.2 builds on proprietary Salesforce and Google Apps APIs to deliver automated SaaS provisioning. It works with Microsoft’s Active Directory, or any existing user directory and authentication mechanism the company already uses for its own applications.

“PingFederate 5.2 makes it easier for users to securely access Google Apps for communication and collaboration, while streamlining administrative requirements and easily scaling as companies grow," said Scott McMullan, Google Apps Partner Lead.

In addition to automated provisioning, PingFederate 5.2 introduces new SaaS Connectors for Salesforce and Google. These new modules further expedite deployment of PingFederate for these SaaS applications by including Quick Connection templates that simplify and streamline configuration by pre-populating connection settings, user/account provisioning parameters and SSO endpoint parameters.

Specific to Salesforce, with PingFederate 5.2, Ping Identity has expanded its list of supported Salesforce access methods to include desktop and mobile browsers, remote users, Salesforce Connect for Microsoft Outlook and emailed report URLs.