Federation: the promise of potentially transforming our business

Ping's Andre Durand has announced an award that not only says good things about his company, but is a crystal clear indication of the importance federated identity technology will inevitably acquire as people adopt it: 

“A few days ago Morgan Stanley awarded Ping their CTO Summit Innovation Award. Ping was the sole recipient of this years award, which recognizes those which hold the  promise of potentially transforming Morgan Stanley’s business. VMware won the award in 2005 — we really like that comparison! Who knew virtualization was going to be as big as it is today 3 or 4 years ago?
   
“Every year Morgan Stanley receives around 200 applications from companies to present at their CTO Summit.  They internally vote and select 36 to present. Of these, only four ever get as far as contracts and of those, only one receives this award.  We presented Ping Identity and our product, PingFederate back in 2006 (is the ulterior motive obvious enough?).  As hoped, earlier this year Morgan Stanley became a customer, using our technology to secure and integrate their employees’ use of on-demand applications such as Salesforce.com among other things.
 
“It’s great to finally see identity federation receive the recognition it deserves for enabling companies to secure their virtual borders. It’s going to be a good year!”

Ping's success doesn't surprise me given the high standards it sets itself.  And we all expect Morgan Stanley's CTO to be forward-thinking and “on the money”, so to speak. 

But still, this is a remarkable bellwether in so clearly recognizing the transformative nature of identity.  Congratulations are due both to Ping and to Jonathan Saxe, Managing Director, Global Chief Information Officer of Morgan Stanley.   

Published by

Kim Cameron

Work on identity.