Today we announced a partnership with Conformity to extend our existing Salesforce & Google Apps SaaS provisioning services to include more robust cloud identity gonvernance capabilities and provisioning to additional enterprise-class SaaS applications.
Conformity provides centralized visibility and control over user access to SasS and cloud-based applications. Together with Ping's SaaS single sign-on, we can help enterprises automate the entire identity management lifecycle to SaaS and cloud-based applications.
Conformity has demonstrated some real deep expertise and capabilities that compliment our strengths. We're looking forward to working with them and our joint customers to solve some really thorny problems for enterprises.
Mark Diodati of Burton Group wrote an interesting piece this morning which describes the trials and tribulations facing adoption of SPML (Service Provisioning Markup Language).
We've watched SPML closely over the years here at Ping, just as we watch the development of all standards which touch within the realm of Intra-company identity management. A few years back in fact, we even wrote our own SPML engine, which was our first step towards full-blown support of SPML to facilitate federated provisioning. We postponed the project after doing deeper market research, and discovering that we were a bit too early to market, and that enterprises weren't quite ready for it.
The market has matured significantly since then, and the need for centralized control over SaaS and cloud provisioning events is needed more than ever, however, having spent several years seeing SAML get to where it is today, I completely understand the challenges of getting markets to hit that tipping point of standardization.
What Mark refers to as the need for a SPML lite is the equivilent of the SAML happy path which over hundreds of customers and thousands of connections, we were able to effectively create here at Ping for the B2B Internet SSO marketplace.
Importance of Independent Pure Play
It's interesting to watch how different markets, with seamingly very similar characteristics and dynamics, play out very differently. Personally, I believe that the independent pure play has an enormous influance on the early success or failure of these enterpise standardization efforts. It all boils down to motivations. The stack vendors are motivated to play a very different game. To them, vertical integration within their stack is their primary mission, because it's how they achieve differentiation, customer lock-in and maximize the value of each customer and deal. It leaves the 'intra-stack' interoperability a distant cousin to the priorities of their own integration requirements. I believe there is more lip service done to open standards by the larger players, especially interfaces that open the door to competing technologies, than real investment. The niche pure play doesn't have these competing priorities, and thus can play a focused role on getting the standards across the chasm, whereby customer demand and momentum dictate that the standards-based interfaces be taken seriously.
Enormous changes are coming in the way video will be delivered over the Internet, and identity federation, single sign-on and SAML are sitting right in the center of it all. Today we announced a partnership with Brightcove to enable TV Everywhere, an industry-wide initiative to resolve how programmers can offer up authenticated video content direct to consumers on the Internet in concert with traditional MSO's.
“From branded destination sites, to syndication and social network distribution, to mobile and connected-TV delivery, Brightcove’s TVE solution and partnership with Ping Identity provides a powerful onramp to rapidly launch TV Everywhere initiatives and a platform for a wide-range of additional functions critical to the success of online video strategies,” said Jeremy Allaire, Brightcove chairman and chief executive officer. “TV Everywhere represents a significant and exciting new opportunity for TV programmers to expand the volume of premium video content available to consumers on the Web.”
First announced by Time Warner and Comcast in June 2009, TV Everywhere is an authentication system that makes certain premium television programming content available to viewers online. Access to such content requires viewers to validate that they have a subscription to a multiservice operator. The concept is quickly being tested and adopted by other cable, satellite and programming operators.
A website called RockYou was recently breached, and 32 million passwords were posted to the Internet for a short period of time.
“This was the mother lode,” said Matt Weir, a doctoral candidate in the e-crimes and investigation technology lab at Florida State University, where researchers examining the data.
Nearly 1% of the 32,000,000 passwords posted (320,000) were "123456".
Overusing simple passwords is not a new phenomenon. A similar survey examined computer passwords used in the mid-1990s and found that the most popular ones at that time were “12345,” “abc123” and “password.”
Single sign-on is going to accelerate the need to strengthen the front door to the Internet, and we've got a lot of work to do, but the smart phone holds the promise of resolving a number of these issues in the years to come.
Ping announced today our Internet Single Sign-On (SAML) certification program for SaaS vendors who have implemented Internet SSO on their own, but want to verify interoperability with PingFederate for use by their enterprise customers. SuccessFactors (NASDAQ: SFSF) and Zoho are amongst the first to become certified.
"Ping Identity, the leader in Internet Identity Security, today announced a new certification program that makes it easier for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers to guarantee their customers fast, easy Single Sign-On access to their on-demand applications. The Ping Certified SaaS Provider Program lets SaaS vendors who have already invested in a Single Sign-On technology test and certify that their SSO implementations work seamlessly with Ping Identity’s Internet SSO solutions."
Under the terms of the Ping Certified SaaS Provider program, SaaS vendors work with Ping Identity Certification (PIC) experts to test and certify that the vendors’ SSO implementations work seamlessly with PingFederate® and PingConnect™. As a result:
Ping Certified SaaS Providers can leverage Ping Identity technology to ensure their existing SSO solutions will interoperate with customers’ varying SSO protocol connectivity requirements.
SaaS customers who are already using Ping Identity solutions to support their organizations’ other Internet SSO requirements can trust that Ping Certified SaaS Providers’ applications will integrate easily into their existing identity management processes.
Ping Certified SaaS Providers can recommend Ping Identity’s SAML-based solutions for customers who don’t have SSO or who need an SSO solution that will work with the SaaS vendor’s application and the customer’s existing SSO implementations.
We officially joined the board of the OpenID Foundation yesterday. This has been a long time coming, and I'm happy that we can finally participate in an official capacity. We've been doing OpenID for some time (aka. www.signon.com) but it's now time to figure out how our core business of serving enterprise and SaaS vendors will need to leverage OpenID in the future. Pam Dingle is our representive on the board, so we've got someone really experienced to participate.
Cegedim Dendrite: Mobile Intelligence Features Single Sign-On Security Through Partnership with Ping Identity
December 21, 2009 12:00 PM EST
BEDMINSTER, N.J.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Cegedim Dendrite and Ping Identity today announced a partnership to enable Internet Single Sign-On security for Cegedim Dendrite's flagship Customer Relationship Management (CRM) suite, Mobile Intelligence. Cegedim Dendrite, the world's leading provider of pharmaceutical CRM with a 35% market share, continues to deliver innovative and industry specific solutions to immediately increase its customers' effectiveness and productivity.
Pam Dingle recently joined Ping and has been working with Patrick in our CTO office. Recently, she created this graph as part of her own understanding of the sorts of token/identity integration challenges that we bridge with PingFederate. It was definitely worth sharing. After 7 years of doing this, we've amassed a fairly large set of integrations, ranging from iIS, IWA, Citrix, Sharepoint, .Net, LDAP, x.509, Google, Salesforce, Workday, PHP, Java, Apache, SAP Netweaver, IBM Websphere, Tivoli Acccess Manager (TAM), CA Siteminder, Oracle Weblogic & OAM and the list is growing all the time. Note the the graphic below the icon in the middle is PingFederate.
SSO Wars
Ping Strikes Back
SSO to Google & Salesforce
PingFederate Air
Introducing SPAML!
Goog SSO
Google Apps SSO: A baby can do it.
