Ping Identity Joins Microsoft Interop Vendor Alliance.

Ping Identity, a provider of Internet Identity Security services and solutions, announced it has joined the Microsoft Interop Vendor Alliance (IVA), an industry-wide group working to identify and share opportunities to better connect people, data and diverse systems through better interoperability with Microsoft systems.

"IVA membership is a significant milestone in Ping Identity's 9-year relationship with Microsoft," said Ping Identity CTO Patrick Harding. "This new ability to collaborate with Microsoft and the Alliance members allows us to further extend our reach into the Microsoft partner ecosystem to strengthen interoperability across a broader range of products."

Ping Identity was invited to join IVA based on its longstanding leadership in Federated Identity standards and best practices in addition to PingFederate product advancements that strengthen interoperability with Microsoft's identity ecosystem.

"We are pleased to welcome Ping Identity to the Interop Vendor Alliance," said Alliance Manager Jas Sandhu. "Ping Identity is a leader in Internet Identity Security solutions, playing a critical role in helping enterprises with heterogeneous infrastructures extend and leverage their Microsoft tools to the Cloud."

In its first IVA lab certification, Ping Identity's flagship Internet Single Sign-On offering, PingFederate has been successfully tested to interoperate with SharePoint 2010 using the WS-Federation protocol. As a result, organizations that are using SharePoint 2010 to collaborate with their business partners now have a way to SSO-enable them, eliminating the need to manage their partners' identities. New capabilities in SharePoint 2010 make it "claims aware" and thus able to natively support SSO transactions. PingFederate enables the business partner, sending the user's identity and attributes to the SharePoint-based partner portal and enabling secure Single Sign-On access.

Additional advances in the latest release of PingFederate make it easier than ever to integrate with Microsoft claims aware development environments. Existing Ping Identity customers who want to use PingFederate with Microsoft's latest claims aware developer tools (Windows Identity Foundation and Visual Studio 2010) or Microsoft shops who want to extend their use of these tools across advanced federation use cases now have those options.

Ping Identity noted it plans to certify these capabilities in future IVA lab tests.

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