Identity vendor Ping adds to wares to support SaaS
Ping Identity Tuesday added to its tools for supporting single sign-on to online
services by acquiring appliance-based technology from Sxip Identity for integrating
hosted applications and corporate directories.
Ping, which develops Ping
Federate, bought Sxip's
Access product portfolio, which includes Access Enterprise Edition, Access
Workgroup Edition and Sxip Audit.
The Access appliance, which itself can run as a hosted service (Workgroup Edition)
or within corporate firewalls, lets users integrate their corporate directories
with applications running in the cloud.
When a user is added to the corporate directory, Access detects the change
and provisions the user for the service. It also works in reverse; when the
user is deleted from the directory, Access deprovisions the user.
Sxip uses something it calls "delegated authentication," which essentially
relies on the corporate network to provide credentials and be the authoritative
source for user access control.
Salesforce.com and Google were Sxip's two largest customers, using the Access
appliance to secure their CRM and Apps applications, respectively.
There is some overlap in the product lines of the two companies in that Ping
Federate has a Salesforce.com adapter for providing users with single sign-on
using their corporate log-on credentials. But Ping had not developed major provisioning
and deprovisioning capabilities in its platform.
"Sxip had done some good work on provisioning, deprovisioning we had not
gotten to so that will accelerate [our efforts]," said Andre Durand, CEO
of Ping. "Sxip's hosted model, its feature set and its appliance form factor
will also help accelerate our learning on those three things."
Durand said Ping is working out a roadmap for its product portfolio, but he
added that it is now apparent where Ping stands.
"It is crystal clear that when it comes to enterprise adoption of single
sign-on and provisioning/deprovisioning of services we are it," he said.
The goal is to help users build a platform for identity
federation, which lets companies share user authentication across security
boundaries, including their own corporate divisions or those of partners.
Like Ping Federate, Sxip Access supports the use of tokens based on the Security
Assertion Markup Language (SAML).
Experts say the model is advantageous for companies because they can provide
credentials in the form of a SAML token, which means a user's true corporate
authentication/authorization credentials never move outside the firewall.
In the acquisition, Ping gets all the intellectual property, existing customer
support agreements and employees around the Access product.
Ping plans to open a Vancouver office to house the former Access development
team.
Ping has nearly 200 enterprise customers and staff across the United States
and Europe. The Sxip acquisition brings approximately 25 additional customers.
» posted by abennett
Network World
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