For Ping Identity, winning a Computing Vendor Excellence Award is validation for its 'next-gen' access management platform

'All of the hard work we've put in behind the scenes is worth it,' says Ping Identity's Clare Rees

When Ping Identity won the Computing Vendor Excellence Identity & Access Management Award, it meant a lot to Jason Goode, regional director EMEA, and his team because it "validated that the company was bringing a next-generation access-management platform to the market".

Clare Rees, marketing director EMEA at the company (pictured above), said that the fact that the award was independently judged had given everyone at Ping Identity a lift.

"It was especially rewarding for us that it was judged be a panel of judges that Computing had put together, and when you have someone who looks at what we do and acknowledges that we are bringing things forward in our particular space, then it is really encouraging for everyone in the organisation because it feels like all of the hard work we've put in is worth it," she said.

"We have some fantastic customers and this was a proof point for all of them, to be recognised for something like this," she added.

Ping Identity was the winner of a closely contested award that featured several other top identity and access management vendors. But what did Goode and Rees believe were the main factors that enabled the company to come out top for the judging panel?

Goode suggested that the company's success was indicative of where the identity and access management market is going, in that enterprises are looking to take up on-premise applications, the public cloud and the private cloud, and they need to look after all of this from an access perspective.

"This is where Ping is unique, in being able to satisfy the demand for some very complex, large organisations that have very high-level security work; we do a lot of work in government, financial services, manufacturing and pharmaceuticals," he said.

Goode said that there are currently layers of complexity within enterprises, not least because of the different types of cloud offerings they are adopting, but also because the workforce is demanding more from their workplaces.

"Their workforce is demanding that they are able to work from anywhere... and they want to be able to access those apps from any device, and on a number of devices. You then add another level of complexity on top of that, that you want the same level of access inside or outside of the network," he explained.

"That's really the problem that we're solving, which is being able to give access to apps to any device, regardless of where they are hosted or where their apps reside. Obviously, that would be in a controlled way - what we're not doing is giving access to all data, we're just giving them access to what they need," he added.

Rees said that this was the key factor that enabled the company to win the Vendor Excellence award.

"I think it's the flexibility and sustainability that Ping can bring in order to solve the problem for these organisations that have been recognised by the judges," she said. "I think what was recognised was the connection we had to the customers, and the problems they were having and how we could solve them," she added.

So what next for Ping Identity?

According to Goode, the firm is busy working on the next stage of the firm's identity management platform.

"We're focusing on building out the intelligence that's needed in the platform to tie various concepts together, because we have the federated identity management piece and the federated access management piece and the value of those two pieces is really going to come together when we have the intelligence engine to be able to audit both the identity and access layers," he said.

He believes this will enable Ping Identity to give customers some interesting data around who is accessing what, when and where.

"This isn't because we want our customers to be able to play 'Big Brother' on their employees. But when it comes to compliance and audit, they need to be able to take that information and display it in a very easy way, and to then automate decisions in real-time around who is able to access what data, and when," Goode explained.