Customer Story
Solutions at-a-Glance
SSO delivers fast and secure authentication for the company’s customers.
Simplified management allows for improved business agility.
High-volume scalability supports accelerated growth of e-commerce.
Open standards allow integration with all partners.
Tech Data Unlocks True Self-service Partner Portal
I'm the global e-business architect for Tech Data Corporation.
Tech Data has a lot of e-commerce tools that we Use to interact with our partners, both our vendors and our and our resellers.
Large number of our transactions come in electronically.
Uh, we have various Interfaces-and-APIs, APIs, and web services.
So due to the way our systems had evolved, uh, a lot of our users for our partners had to Manage multiple sets of credentials, usernames and passwords for our portals and for our APIs.
It got to the point where it was a half dozen or more.
It became a governance issue.
Companies didn't, didn't know if they could de-provision all of their users after an Employee had left the company.
There was no way to know what one user was Doing across their entire business interactions with Tech Data, And we decided that we had to fix it.
We had to give them one consolidated experience and one consolidated set of credentials to Interact with our systems.
We Wanted one consolidated system to handle vendor and reseller identities.
No longer would there be two separate systems.
We wanted consistent password enforcement.
Policies, uh, password reset capabilities, uh, user governance.
We wanted, when a user left their company, all they had to do was deactivate one login Account.
We needed the system to be secure.
We wanted to make sure that we would never be the source of a breach.
It needed to be able to handle single sign-on.
We have, uh, various requests and various implementations to, to integrate not just with, uh, vendor partners but with third-party integrators and others Customers who want to make sure that they don't have to, You know, want the users to manage credentials within their systems either.
We want one version of the truth and one version of a user across any interaction that happens with Tech Data or its partners.
The first piece we had to knock out was authentication.
We had already owned PingFederate for handling our single sign-on needs, But we decided to use PingFederate as our authentication gateway that would allow us to Have the consolidated authentication experience, password management experience, and single sign-on experience across all of our offerings.
The next piece that we needed was an actual user store to store these users and these Complex business relationships that we have.
I engaged several partners trying to find the right solution.
When given my list of requirements, the only partner who stepped up to the plate was Unbound ID.
They were able to manage, um, what I always Called my worst-case or nightmare scenario of a user having to deal with the PingOne Protect data Across various contexts as a reseller or a vendor with multiple account numbers in each Situation and being able to manage those Authorizations appropriately.
The Objective
As one of the world’s largest distributors of IT products and services, Tech Data provides extensive product lines, logistics capabilities, and value-added services to more than 105,000 resellers who deploy IT solutions.
The e-commerce giant offers a self-service portal for its partners, who use the portal to perform a vital range of tasks like checking inventory and viewing credit line statuses. Tech Data wanted to deliver a frictionless experience for customers and vendor partners. But to do so, it needed to replace an antiquated system that no longer supported the complex needs of the business.
The Challenge
Tech Data faced numerous challenges. It needed a secure system that gives a complete and consolidated view of each user so that it wouldn't become the next target for breach. A cumbersome legacy system required redundant sign-on attempts. The company needed to integrate with third-party vendors while supporting open standards. And, limited scalability inhibited customer preference and profile management options.
The Solution
After Toth researched solutions to overhaul the portal, the Ping Identity Platform was the obvious choice. Federated single sign-on (SSO) allows Tech Data’s third-party vendors to easily manage and authenticate its end-users in a highly secure way.
With PingDirectory, Tech Data is also able to store relationship information that spans multiple business partnerships with its users. “The Ping team came in and spoke to us at great length about the capabilities,” Toth said. “We stood up an internal POC inside Tech Data. They came in and did a streamlined version of what we were trying to do in under two weeks, which no other supplier was willing to do.”
Because Tech Data is a multi-national company with business and IT stakeholders worldwide, Toth needed to pitch the Ping Identity Platform as a global solution. He got alignment across the European and U.S. e-commerce folks, the global IT security team, and the CIO. From there, Toth said, the decision was easy.
Ping is our enabler and the most significant piece of our ability to federate with our partners. We’ve tried many different solutions over the years and Ping just works.
Erik Toth
Global e-Business Architect
The Results
With the Ping Identity Platform in place, Tech Data’s customers experience a self-service portal that quickly gets them where they need to go. Users have seamless access to Tech Data’s third-party services via SSO, and their sensitive data is securely stored and managed. The platform adds a highly scalable user directory for customer preference and profile management. And, the portal is easy to administer; open standards mean that it can be integrated with all of Tech Data’s partners.
More About Tech Data
Tech Data Corporation is one of the world's largest wholesale distributors of technology products, services, and solutions. Its advanced logistics capabilities and value-added services enable 115,000 resellers to efficiently and cost-effectively support the diverse technology needs of end-users in more than 100 countries.
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