Ping will offer its PingFederate product, which manages federated identity, to SaaS providers on a pay as you go program that doesn’t charge usual license fees, but instead charges on a revenue sharing model. Ping is also bundling some joint marketing and support into the bundle.
With the program, Ping supplies its PingFederate identity server and integration kit for development and production use. Rather than charge SaaS providers the usual license fee up front, Ping will supply its offering and then charge only if and when the SaaS provider gets real business, basing its charges on the number of clients that the customer actually attracts.
On the go-to-market side, Ping will offer joint webinars, listing in Ping Identity’s SaaS vendor directory on its web site, lead sharing, joint RFP responses, plus sales education and support training.
In a related announcement, Ping is adding support for the most recent Microsoft SharePoint offerings, including SharePoint Server 2007 and SharePoint Portal Server 2003.
Our View
Single sign-on, of course, is nothing new. But it has been a market sector that, prior to web services, has been the domain of proprietary tools. With the emergence of SOA and Oasis web services standards, the idea was that maybe this time, standards could finally extend to the area of single sign-on. That would be a logical conclusion, because when you federate identity to multiple applications, you will inevitably deal with a melange of different software platforms.
However, a single standard never emerged. As an outgrowth of the old Sun/Microsoft Java vs. .NET rivalry, two Oasis standard shave emerged side-by side: SAML, which was heir to the Liberty Alliance, and WS-Federation, whose heritage reflects Microsoft’s earlier attempts to envelope the world within a single Passport and Hailstorm. Today, both standards coexist side by side, and that’s what ping supports.
The other highlight of the announcement is a trend towards lowering the barriers for tools that would support an emerging SaaS software industry. Although you may on one end have behemoths like Salesforce.com plus new hosted offerings form traditional enterprise application vendors, the vast majority of SaaS providers are startups.
Given that these startups are basing their business model on subscription rather than perpetual license pricing, meaning they expect their customers to only pay as they go, it makes sense that SaaS vendors would conduct their own business in similar fashion. And that’s exactly the reason why Ping is offering pay-as-you-go pricing.
