Last week, we flew everyone in Ping to Denver from around the globe to celebrate 2011 and kickoff 2012. We only do it when we hit our stretch goals, so we celebrate as if it were our last time all being together physically as a company. Certainly as we've grown, the logistics have become more significant, but what a week it was. One for the history books here at Ping for sure.

Here are a few highlights of 2011 and then some pics from the week.

• Surpassed $100 million in lifetime sales
  
• 200 New Enterprise Customers
  • 2 of the 3 largest U.S. hospital conglomerates
  • 3 of the 5 largest U.S. health plans
  • 4 of the 6 largest U.S. banks are now customers of Ping Identity
  • 42 of the Fortune 100 

• 61 new SaaS companies leveraged Ping for cloud identity integration
  
• 200% growth in EMEA and new Asia Pacific and Japan sales offices
• Named a most exciting vendor by 451 Group: TheInfoPro “Security 14 -- Information Security Study 2H 2011”
• Hosted 5 different Cloud Identity Summit events with over 500 industry leaders
  
• Secured $21 million financing
• Introduced 1st commercial support for OAuth -- secure native mobile application access and API security
• Introduced new Cloud Identity Connectors for LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft Live, Salesforce.com and Google
  
• Introduced CloudDesktop -- giving companies a single point of access for all of their SaaS and Cloud-based apps
• Introduced PingFederate on Amazon EC2  -- an easy public cloud deployment alternative
• Helped create Simple Cloud Identity Management (SCIM) provisioning standard
• Introduced our new certified partner training program
• Expanded our 3 offices to accommodate growth (Denver, Boston, Vancouver)
• Won the Denver Grow Healthy Employer Award
• Improved our customer satisfaction to 99% (as reported by an independent survey)
  

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Them are fight'n words. It's the annual stock show here in Denver. We brought our colors.

Time certainly does fly when you’re having fun and boy have we had a fun year. I feel as if I’m living in dog years lately; so much changing while at the same time, so much remaining the same.

What’s Changing?

As I reflect on 2011 and think of the year ahead, it’s clear that both cloud and mobile, two mega-trends, will drive identity further into the spotlight. Why? Because identity is one of the few constants capable of enabling security as everything else becomes untethered. It’s always been that way, but we masked the issue when we could keep things safe and contained within our sand box. As users, applications and data scale beyond our perimeter to the cloud via mobile, the old paradigm of control and security completely breaks down. 

Fortunately for us, the building blocks of identity (open identity standards) are also accelerating (things like SAML, OAuth, SCIM, XACML), and as they do, so too will identity become increasingly embedded and seamless, weaving its way intuitively into everything we do and every device we touch.

For large enterprises, the shift will be gradual, evolutionary in nature, as the new paradigm must be absorbed as an extension to today’s methods of security and control. This will manifest itself in hybrid architectures, where existing control over identity remains within the enterprise, but some use-cases migrate to the cloud for speed, convenience and cost savings. For others, companies with fewer legacy dependencies to carry forward, the trend will be more radical as they start in the cloud with the new paradigm and move forward from there.

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Every year we do a family Halloween party here at Ping Denver and every year it's become a little more epic. There were so many incredible costumes that I can't show them all here, but we'll post them to our Facebook page.

"Sick and Tired of Your Dumb Help Desk Tickets" - IT Jeremy

Road Kill Peter 

Princess Amber

Just Plain Spooky

ZZ Wendy

Incredible Joe

Pirate Natalie

Medusa Malissa

At Your Service Andre

See more on the Ping Identity Facebook page.

We’re in the midst of something big, and identity is squarely at the center of the transformation. It’s being brought about by the convergence of three massive trends (cloud computing, mobile adoption and social media) and the need to make information sharing seamless.
 
We hear about it all the time from our largest customers. Their vision is to enable information to flow to the right people no matter where that information resides. Our customers see the cloud as more than an “IT thing” that lowers costs and enables better agility. They see it as a whole new means of providing seamless employee and customer experiences across varied service offerings: some internal, some via partners and some in the cloud.

As one of our customers in the financial services industry recently stated:

 “… we offer a number of value-added services to our best customers, but they weren’t integrated, and we couldn’t have our best customers with the worst customer experience. Single Sign-On was a requirement and Ping was the only company that could solve all our use-cases across the cloud, mobile and social networks.”
 
A single identity that follows you everywhere sounds simple and is by no means a new concept. So why is it so difficult? The complexity arises in the fact that applications and the security that surrounds them is silo’d. To unlock the seamless-access vision, we’ve got to integrate a higher notion of identity and access control across a very heterogeneous environment. 
 
If we can manage through the complexity of integrating this vision with today’s existing infrastructures, we may just find ourselves somewhere extraordinary. We may discover a world that is simultaneously more secure AND more convenient, two states which are normally at odds.
 
While Ping has been at the forefront of this transformation for years, vis-à-vis federated identity, the sheer scope and ambition of many current projects is a departure from humble beginnings focused largely on enabling a few SaaS partner SSO integrations.

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One of the things I enjoy most about running a company is all of the little traditions that you get to create and participate in over the years. Friday's have become a bit special here in Denver, as we turn on the music and I work from our communal table in the middle of the office. It's a great place to catch up with folks and find out about their week, sort of my version of the water cooler.

Another little tradition we have here is budget reviews. They started way back in 2002, with Eric Norlin, Bryan Field-Elliot, Linda Elliott, Bill Reid and David Waite. We were all crammed into one tiny 150-square-foot office so we'd head downstairs on Wednesday's around 3pm to The Keg and "review our budget". Reviewing the budget largely consisted of catching up on our week and discussing the future of identity over a few drinks. Those early days were magical and you can never replace them. But I've learned over the years that every stage of a company is magical and none of it can be replaced, so you've got to enjoy all of it, the good, the bad, and everything in between.

Today we bought lunch for everyone in celebration of some of the big deals we won last week. A bit later, as people wind down their week, I plan to take the folks out for a good ole' fashion budget review. Life is good.

Digital certificates, security codes, patient records, credit card numbers, email addresses, employee data; all stolen in one breach or another. These days, it’s a full-contact criminal game out on the Internet and in the cloud. Those without the skills and resources to protect themselves become more vulnerable with each click of the mouse.

While October is officially CyberSecurity Awareness Month, it seems only prudent that corporations devise a strategy that keeps them vigilant each day of the year.

The October awareness campaign is run by the Department of Homeland Security, which offers a number of cybersecurity tips on its Web site that are worth exploring by businesses, consumers and schools.

From Ping’s vantage point, we see cloud identity finally emerging as the centerpiece of a (cyber)secure yet highly interwoven and networked economy. With the explosion of software-as-a-service the need to know who is doing what, where and when on your network or in your service-provider’s datacenter is emerging as state-of-the-art oversight.

Ping for years has backed single sign-on and federation to support secure resource access in the enterprise and across corporate domains, and now we are talking about a similar set of best practices for securing the cloud.

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(Update - ADConnect beta now available here via Salesforce.com AppExchange.)

San Francisco – Salesforce.com is quietly building an impressive enterprise authentication and authorization layer onto its SaaS platform and positioning itself as the poster child for how to identity-enabled and secure corporate cloud services.

At its annual Dreamforce conference Wednesday, the company unveiled a Mobile software development kit for identity-enabling mobile apps, demonstrated automatic single sign-on (SSO) and debuted just-in-time provisioning to Salesforce apps using a single Active Directory log-in, and showed how it will secure mobile, Web, desktops and APIs all through a platform identity layer.

Salesforce’s cloud identity build-out, which has been ongoing the past few years, is an impressive feat given that other major providers such as Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Microsoft are trying to construct similar capabilities but have yet to rival Salesforce’s accomplishments.

“We have been pursuing this effort of ‘federate with us once and we are going to make it work regardless of your access method to the cloud be it Web, mobile, desktop or API,’ ” said Chuck Mortimore, director of product management for identity and security at Salesforce. “No matter what the access point, you will use the same credential.”

While that might seem insecure on its face, Salesforce is using a combination of protocols, including the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), and OAuth 2.0 to securely pass authentication and authorization data via signed assertions and tokens while keeping credentials safely within the enterprise or an identity cloud service.

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