Ping Identity Ships ‘Social’ Cloud Identity, SSO Tools 
Ping Identity is shipping a new series of PingFederate OpenID Cloud Identity Connectors to allow enterprises to rely on cloud services providers and as well as social-networking sites for third-party user authentication. Ping’s offering works with Facebook, Google, AOL and Yahoo!
Ping Identity is shipping a new series of PingFederate OpenID Cloud Identity Connectors to allow enterprises to rely on cloud services providers and as well as social-networking sites for third-party user authentication. Ping’s The OpenID Cloud Identity Connector works with any provider that acts as an OpenID 2.0 provider including Yahoo!, Facebook, Google Apps and AOL.
With the release PingFederate’s OpenID Cloud Identity Connectors, businesses now have an easy way to authenticate customers who are accessing their online stores, while connecting these customer portals and websites to popular social media outlets, said Ping Identity’s CTO Patrick Harding.
“Identity federation at the enterprise is converging with the consumer and social media realm,” Harding said in a statement. Ping’s OpenID Cloud Identity Connectors install inside PingFederate, so enterprises can provide sign-on and registration for their customers using the log in information they use at social media sites such as Facebook, Yahoo, Google and AOL, Harding added.
Inside Ping’s Architecture
for Cloud-Based Authentication
PingFederate’s Open ID Cloud Identity Connectors allow businesses to enable authentication to their cloud-based applications for both B2B and B2C uses – supporting consumer-facing use cases, as well as letting businesses use Google Apps as a cloud-based authentication mechanism for B2B partners without their own identity infrastructures.
For enterprises supporting multiple cloud identity providers, an “SSO Selector” enables web developers to easily integrate the sign-on user interface to their websites, Harding added.
Identity federation at the enterprise is converging with the consumer and social media realm.”
Patrick Harding
CTO
Ping Identity
For Google, PingFederate’s OpenID Cloud Identity Connector provides the option to use Google Apps to manage partner identities. A connection is created with Google Apps which acts as the identity provider (IdP) while the partner running PingFederate acts as the service provider (SP). Incoming users authenticated by Google can SSO to local applications as well as to additional applications operated by third parties.
For Facebook, PingFederate’s OpenID Cloud Identity Connector allows Facebook to be used as a third-party authentication source, according to the company. The Connector interfaces with the Facebook Graph API using OAuth 2.0 for authentication, and also acquires an OAuth access token to gather additional data about the user.
Harding and his team developed PingFederate’s Cloud Identity Connectors to allow enterprises to derive more key benefits from using social networking sites by:
Increasing Registration; Rates of Purchase -- Increase registration and purchase rates on your consumer-facing Web sites while providing a more personalized experience by empowering customers to easily access your Web sites via their social media logins.
Reducing User Identity Management Overhead -- Leveraging cloud-based identity providers, enterprises can reduce license, infrastructure and ongoing maintenance costs of traditional identity stores.
Delivering More Personalized Content, User Experience -- Enterprises can also request additional information about the user to provide a personalized experience and deliver more targeted content – and increase conversion rates from social media traffic at online stores.
One analyst said allowing users to create accounts and sign on using an existing consumer identity has significantly reduced drop-off rates.
“Enterprises benefit by reducing the expense and burden of managing consumer—and in some cases partner and contractor identities—and can request additional data about the user to provide a customized user experience,” said IDC Analyst Sally Hudson in the statement.
PingFederate Cloud Identity Connectors are now available for Salesforce and Facebook. A beta version of the OpenID Cloud Identity Connector is available for OpenID providers including Google, Yahoo, AOL and others. Additional connections will be released in 2011, the company said.
