Ping Identity on Tuesday added features to automatically create connections between partners to support single sign-on as part of the next release of its identity federation server.

The release of Ping Federate 5.0 is highlighted by Auto-Connect, which uses e-mail domains to validate business users’ identity provider and then automatically creates trusted links between partners to support single sign-on. The feature requires users to have Ping Federate 5.0 at either end of the connection.

Ping says it hopes to standardize the single sign-on (SSO) capabilities by adding them as a new profile in the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) 2 specification. Ping is working with the Internet 2 Consortium, Shibboleth and others on that effort. (Learn more about Identity Management products from our Identity Management Buyer's Guide.)

The company says the SSO feature is best suited for companies that need internal users to access outside resources, such as Web-based applications from a service provider. The feature would give those users SSO to all of a provider’s services.
The other envisioned use is for governments agencies, which could authenticate there users and then provide SSO to a variety services from other government agencies.

“We are inspired by the e-mail server,” says Mike Donaldson, vice president of marketing for Ping. “Once the e-mail server works with one other it works with all of them. I don’t have to go and test each and every e-mail connection. If federation could get to that point as well using Auto-Connect, or a SAML profile, then we could eliminate a huge barrier to adoption.”

Ping has also added more integration kits to marry Ping with existing identity services within an organization. The new kits include Apache and Microsoft Internet Information Server.

Ping Federate 5.0 also includes new clustering and performance management features to support data center deployments. Also new is the Advanced Authentication module that supports strong and multifactor authentication, and the ability to plug in support for user-centric identities from CardSpace and OpenID.

Ping Federate is priced by either server, connection, subscription or perpetual license ranging from $10,000 to $100,000.