Why should I use Ping products instead of building my own?

PIng Identity's products offer many advantages over "do it yourself" options like open source, component libraries and designing your own proprietary SSO from scratch. Consider the following criteria when comparing your options:

Use case support: How much effort would be required to support your current and future use cases? If you are unfamiliar with the use cases supported by Ping products, check out the Tech Answers "use cases" section. PingFederate, supports seven major Internet Identity Security use cases including SSO for external and on-demand applications, service provider customer SSO, Internet User Account Management and Universal Token Translation. If you build your own identity federation software, most use cases will require a major engineering effort.

Integration requirements: Organizations that build their own identity federation solutions often find that getting single sign-on working is only a small percentage of the total project. Building integrations to "first-mile" identity management systems or directories, "last-mile" application integrations, plus PKI, can be extremely time- and resource-intensive. PingFederate integrates with 15 different types of systems, including major identity management systems, directories, custom application environments, Web portals, Web servers and even commercial applications. 

Field-proven, standards-based SSO: Ping products support major identity federation standards, including SAML 1.x, SAML 2.0, and WS-Federation. Integrating our products with an application that already supports these standards requires minimal time and effort. Also consider more than 400 SaaS vendors,  enterprises and government agencies worldwide use PingFederate for Internet SSO. PingFederate is Liberty interop certified against more vendors than any other product on the market, ensuring compatibility with a wide array of identity federation products. If you decide to deploy your own, custom-designed, proprietary SSO, you will be required to convince each and every partner to utilize your SSO approach, and that's not easy or necessary when there are standards readily available.

Architecture and production readiness: Another key design issue is how to build a solution that is "enterprise ready," including ensuring high performance and scalability, security and backup/recovery. Also consider that an identity federation server becomes a critical component of the security infrastructure and must be highly secure. PingFederate is an enterprise-ready, highly scalable platform that has been deployed in hundreds of business- and mission-critical installations around the world. 

Support and maintenance: Consider how much support is required to deploy and maintain a custom identity federation solution on an ongoing basis. Custom-built solutions require support on both sides of the connection. Who will provide the support? Ping Identity's services and support organization is highly regarded, and 99% of our customers renew their support year after year.

Time-to-deploy: Comparisons of the time required to build a custom identity federation solution with Ping Identity products show that custom solutions can take up to 90 days just to establish the first Internet SSO connection to a single application. Full-scale deployments can take upwards of a year. Ping products install in hours and deploy in days, with full-scale deployments possible in 30 days or less.

TCO: Carefully consider the total cost of ownership for custom-building a solution against Ping's products. When you add up the entire cost, including development, production readiness, deployment time, and ongoing support, you will discover that our products are actually less expensive than building your own. Also consider that our products support many other use cases, which further extend their business value.

When you consider all of these factors, you will find that purchasing Ping Identity products delivers much better business value in a drastically shorter timeline. In addition, our products support many different use cases, helping to "future-proof" your solution.