Digital identity. We all have one today, many in fact, perhaps even too many. For businesses faced with ever-present security concerns, simplifying the way these digital identities are used and managed has become a strategic imperative. And one that Ping Identity set out to address—developing the world’s first rapidly deployable identity federation software, PingFederate. It provides users throughout an organization with safe access to Internet applications without the need to re-login.

Founded in 2002, Ping Identity has a singular focus, says CEO Andre Durand, “We’re looking to be the ubiquitous choice for standards-based, secure single sign-on (SSO) over the Internet. We want to be the choice for federation. And we’re particularly focused on the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers because we see that as a huge growth potential—every SaaS provider needs to implement this technology.”

According to Durand, “Companies now view Secure Internet SSO as a strategic initiative that needs to be applied across all applications and external partner relationships.”

Several years ago it became clear that all enterprises were operating on different security architectures—and continually having to reset passwords for employees, partners, acquisitions, affiliations, joint ventures, and more. Something had to change, and it did. Vendors including Microsoft® and large enterprises collaborated on writing federated identity standards—specifically WS-Federation and SAML—that would enable companies and their employees and partners to have secure SSO over the Internet. The problem? The first federated identity software products were incomplete and difficult to use, resulting in deployment projects that consumed months of time and ate up valuable resources.

Explains Durand, “Single sign-on that works over the Internet is perceived to be difficult and expensive. This notion is proliferated by vendors such as IBM, Oracle, and Computer Associates that provide expensive, all-or-nothing, tightly coupled enterprise identity management solutions. We wanted to make the whole identity federation process much easier and faster.”

More than four years ago, the company started working with Microsoft to help create the WS-Federation standard—an add-on to Microsoft’s Active Directory® Federation Services (ADFS). Durand says Ping Identity was one of the first Microsoft partners to implement the WS-Federation protocol. And since many of its customers also demand access to Microsoft platforms via SAML, Ping set out to develop a product that would provide ‘identity middleware’ to enable user access to and from Microsoft technologies that are widely deployed across the enterprise.

Today, PingFederate, Ping’s flagship product, is rapidly becoming the industry benchmark for standards-based federated Identity Management to secure, connect, and control a company’s identity interactions with other organizations. SignOn.com is bringing these same capabilities to consumers.

With PingFederate’s easy-to-use software, deployments that used to take six months now take days, or even less. With its comprehensive administrative console, external partner connections can be configured without extensive knowledge of SAML or WS-Federation. And its out-of-the-box integration kits provide easy first-mile integration, leveraging existing identity infrastructure, and last mile integration, providing scalable target application connections.

Explains Durand, “Providing secure user sign-on to externally hosted SaaS providers is the fundamental driver for Internet SSO use cases. Due to this demand, we developed a specialized SaaS program that rapidly enables any SaaS provider to expose access to their services through standards-based methods like SAML or WS-Federation. On the other side of the equation, we offer over 14 ways to integrate and enable Microsoft technologies for Secure SSO to SaaS providers.”

Ping’s strong partnership with Microsoft has resulted in comprehensive interoperability between the two companies’ products. The company has leveraged a number of core Microsoft technologies, such as Microsoft Active Directory and ADFS, as well as Microsoft SharePoint® 2003 and 2007, the .NET Framework, and Internet Information Server (IIS).

As an example, PingFederate’s integration kit for Microsoft SharePoint 2003 and 2007 provides a critical tool to service providers that wish to expose collaborative content to partners or external users. For custom-built applications, PingFederate provides out of the box .NET Framework and Internet Integration Service (IIS) application integration capability. For emerging user-centric SSO, PingFederate provides ready support for Open ID and Microsoft’s CardSpace technologies. PingFederate uses the WS-Federation protocol that enables interoperability with Microsoft’s ADFS.

According to Durand, “We offer a cross-platform approach that enables both .NET and Java applications to participate in WS-Federation and/or SAML-based federations. This is a key requirement for service providers that run a heterogeneous application environment and wish to accommodate all SSO standards demanded by their partner base. In addition, large enterprise customers have a need to provide Secure Internet SSO for Java and .NET applications.”

As a member of the Microsoft Start-Up Accelerator Program, Ping says it is looking forward to increasing its visibility across Microsoft teams and channels. The company is also part of the TAP Program for Active Directory Federation Services, and has worked closely with Microsoft on co-authoring new revisions of standards.

Ping has more than 150 customers worldwide, including big names such as Aetna, Cisco  ystems, Comcast, Expedia, Siebel, Sungard, and the Department of Homeland Security to name a few. It also claims to have 30 of the top Fortune 100 companies as its customers, and PingFederate manages more than 500 federated partner connections.

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