Ping Identity Named a Strong Performer in The Forrester Wave™: Customer Identity and Access Management, Q4 2020

As security and business leaders are under pressure to accelerate digital transformation, it’s no surprise that the customer identity and access management (CIAM) category is reported to be growing annually at 20-25%.

Forrester Research conducted an evaluation of the 13 most significant vendors in CIAM, in The Forrester Wave™: Customer Identity and Access Management, Q4 2020. We’re pleased to announce that Ping was named a “Strong Performer” in this evaluation, noted for our Ping Intelligent Identity™ platform and dedicated cloud-based, API-oriented CIAM platform, PingOne for Customers.

The vendor evaluation was broken into three main categories: strategy, market presence and current offering. We believe this year’s Forrester Wave™ report acknowledges that Ping is pushing the industry forward in CIAM along each of three dimensions:

• CIAM Strategy
• CIAM Scale
• Customer Authentication
  
  

Ping was given the highest possible scores in the strategy category’s criteria of Data Orchestration Workflows and User Management; Identity Verification (IDV) and Registration; Identity Analytics and Threat Feeds; and Decentralized and Self Sovereign Identity. Ping Identity also received the highest possible scores in the authentication Attempts per Hour criterion and in the criteria of Identity Verification and Fraud Management, Execution Roadmap, Professional Services and Partner Ecosystem.
 
The report states that, “Customers love that the [Ping] solution offers a broad set of supported authentication standards, readily usable biometrics integration and recovery, nice productized integration with identity verification services, good progressive profiling, and extensive user management of enrolled devices.” 

This sentiment has been echoed publicly by Ping customers, including Stephanie Kesler, Enterprise Architect/Technologist at GCI. Stephanie explains how Ping’s customer focus has positively impacted her company by saying, “Ping provides the perfect modular components we need to realize our customer identity and access management vision.  The flexible CIAM platform allows customers to have a secure, unified profile and set of credentials to access all of their various services.”

This year’s Forrester Wave™ opened with Key Takeaways highlighting Identity Verification and Scalability as key differentiators to deliver frictionless and delightful customer experiences and accelerated time-to value. The report also states that ”The CIAM market has been undergoing major changes...” and that “CIAM is no longer just an extension of general IAM capabilities...”. 

To us, these takeaways make it clear that lines of business responsible for identity are demanding CIAM solutions that are intelligent, provide greater interoperability through open standards, offer broader coverage for all of their use cases across their hybrid IT environments, all while driving customer loyalty and trust. We’ve built capabilities reflecting each of these assumptions into the Ping Intelligent Identity platform.

Ping’s solutions provide CIAM capabilities to make a customer’s experience seamless and secure by focusing on three key areas of their journey:

Acquiring and Retaining Customers

Your registration process informs your customers’ first impression of you. But if it’s inconsistent across channels or difficult to use, you risk making a bad impression on them or losing them altogether. Our Customer360 solution delivers streamlined customer sign-on and registration processes which greatly enhance the user experience.

PingOne MFA provides customer-friendly authentication methods that don’t add unnecessary friction to their experience. From passwordless authentication and beyond, our solution provides centralized authentication services that enable consistent sign-on experiences so you can drive interaction and revenue.

Driving Customer Loyalty and Revenue

Improving customer experiences doesn’t stop at sign-on. With 40% of customers abandoning an enterprise after a single bad experience, having a customer identity solution that facilitates consistent, multi-channel personalization is key to driving revenue and loyalty. 

Ping’s solutions help you unify customer data across disparate user stores to ensure that all of your digital properties have access to a single view of your customers. PingDirectory helps you provide personalized multi-channel experiences that drive revenue and loyalty.

Building Customer Trust

Compliance with regulations like the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Protection Act (CCPA) doesn’t stop at capturing customer consent. You have to consistently enforce consent choices across a broad range of potential users and applications.

Whether data is requested directly from user data stores or through APIs, we can help you ensure that only data that adheres to consent and privacy requirements is returned.  Our Privacy and Consent Management solution gives your customers control over and insight into their data, helping you build a foundation of privacy that makes complying with any current or future regulatory requirements easy.

To learn more about the financial impact customer identity can have on your business, check out the Customer Identity Value Calculator.

The reality is that your customers’ expectations just keep growing. In addition to consistent interactions on all devices, user-friendly interfaces and data security, customers also expect near-instant access to the content, products and services of brands they interact with. In fact, one study found that people will abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load. 

These levels of service are even more difficult to maintain in environments with tens or hundreds of millions of customers and many thousands of logins per second. There are a number of new business drivers that are making scalability for customers more urgent, including:

1. Customer experience expectations are rising
2. Mobile interactions are more frequent
3. Customer profile data is more complex
   
   

The Forrester Wave™ report recommends that “CIAM customers should look for providers that: scale to large numbers of users in both technology and price,” and also states that, “Customers seek a CIAM vendor with a proven track record of serving tens of millions of customers with its CIAM solution.” 

Serving more than 60% of the Fortune 100, Ping’s solutions are engineered for scale and performance. We work with some of the world’s largest enterprises to help them modernize their IAM solutions and accelerate growth.

To learn how we helped HP provide a better sign-on experience for over 150 million identities and growing, read the customer story.

Transitioning to the cloud is a critical step in many enterprises’ digital transformation. But not every on-premises application has a SaaS substitute, nor can all on-premises software effectively migrate to the cloud. The need to support resources across SaaS, cloud and on-premises data centers has made hybrid IT a reality for almost every large enterprise.
 
To support hybrid IT environments, vendors need to give their customers the flexibility to deploy and manage CIAM how and where they want. CIAM solutions that aren’t designed with hybrid IT in mind can add delays and risks to your cloud strategy. The end result is often complicated workarounds that come with a hefty price tag and take a toll on user experience.

The Forrester Wave™ report noted that Ping’s solution “is a good fit for firms that have complex customer access management requirements and many on-prem applications they must integrate into the [single sign-on] regime.”

Customer experience is a strategic priority for many organizations. A thoughtfully chosen and well-implemented CIAM solution, like those offered by Ping, can make a huge impact on both your organization’s top and bottom lines.

Want to learn how you can deliver exceptional customer experiences that truly set you apart? Join Ping’s CEO, Andre Durand, as he interviews poker-player-turned-entrepreneur Molly Bloom about how to create extraordinary experiences. Register here.