Ping Identity CEO On Channel Revamp And Going ‘All-In With Partners’

In an interview with CRN, Ping Identity Founder and CEO Andre Durand says the company is making a ‘complete commitment to partners’ with the debut of its redesigned Nexus Partner Program.

Ping Identity is making a “complete commitment to partners” with the debut Thursday of its redesigned Nexus Partner Program, according to Ping Identity Founder and CEO Andre Durand.

In an interview with CRN, Durand said the identity security and access management vendor has done a “top to bottom” revamp of its channel program to enable its next phase of growth with the help of solution and service provider partners.

The new Nexus program is geared toward providing newly defined “pathways” to partners including a path for those focused on resale of licenses and a path for system integrator and service provider partners. The program overhaul also includes new support and enablement offerings, a redesigned partner portal and the introduction of a Partner Advisory Board.

The move comes several months after Ping Identity announced, at the end of September 2024, that it was nearing $800 million in annual recurring revenue after seeing year-over-year ARR growth of 31 percent for its SaaS offerings. The growth has been bolstered by the combination of the company with digital identity provider ForgeRock, in a merger that closed in September 2023.

“As much as we have a lot of Global 5000 customers, there are still a lot of customers that we don't have a relationship with — and partners are a big part of what will change that,” Durand said. Ultimately, “we continue to move all-in with partners.”

In the interview, Durand also discussed newer areas of focus for Ping, including in decentralized identity and fraud prevention, as well as the durability of opportunities in identity security even amid global economic uncertainty.

What follows is an edited portion of CRN’s interview with Durand.

With your new partner program launch, what can you say about your channel strategy at this stage?

We don't view it as optional, which is why we have a partner-first approach to going to market. To us, there are three types of partners. There are partners that help us find and source new opportunities, that have frameworks for customers to go through either digital transformation or customer experience improvement or better security through zero trust. We have partners who have deep deployment and integration and technical expertise with our platform. And then we have partners who represent more of a distribution channel for us, and they facilitate the procurement process. So we see all three as being instrumental in all of the geographies that we serve, and really not optional, which is why we have a partner-first strategy.

What are your biggest priorities with partners over the next 12 months?

We've identified our priority partners. These are partners in all of our geographies that have demonstrated both a desire and capability to go deep with us into the Global 5000. We've segmented that partner group into three categories [with] the announcement of our Nexus partner program. We have partners that represent a sales-endorsed route to market. These are partners that co-sell with us. We have delivery-approved partners. These are partners who have been certified and trained and have a number of successful implementations in a geography or in a vertical or with a particular capability of Ping. And then we have technology partners — other vendors with technology that looks to integrate with Ping or around Ping. All three are part of this new Nexus partner program.

Along with that, we are creating a Partner Advisory Board to help guide us into serving those three constituents better. We are including them as part of the team, as we did in our go-to-market kickoffs. Many of them are included in elements of our QBRs and business reviews. So they're just being woven into the way in which we serve the large global market. And this announcement is really just a further refinement. We've been doing this for a while, but we continue to move all-in with partners.

What are some of the other major updates with your partner program launch?

We're making investments in our partner portal. We’re making significant investments to train, certify, co-sell, co-deliver with each one of the partner types that I just described. We continue to allocate more budget. We are building programs that allow success with partners, to build marketing funds so that we can build upon that success, take some of the dollars of that success and reapply them back into the partnership to go jointly find new customers that we can then deliver with. Everything related to investment dollars in partners direct for current business, for future business, and then also making sure we've got good alignment with our field organization and the incentives of our field organization to work with partners. All of that, top to bottom, front to back, end to end, is being designed with partners being a central theme and integral into our route to market. Everything has been looked at. [There are] lots of little changes, but it is very end to end, top to bottom, front to back, through the entire life cycle, from acquiring a new customer, deploying the customer, expanding with the customer, and doing that every step of the way with partners.

What have been the results for the growth of Ping from the combination with ForgeRock?

I think we've gone from the promise of two organizations coming together and how well could we execute — and what would it mean to customers and the market — to the reality of it. We had a very, very strong year last year. I think our customer base — the Global 5000 — and the markets that we serve now really appreciate the combined strengths of Ping and ForgeRock. So the capability or the platform itself, the breadth and depth of the platform for the types of customers that we serve.

You don't always know how well the organizations will get together, either culturally or the product alignment or the receptivity from the market. But last year was a great year, and this year has also started off exceptionally strong.

What sort of traction are you finding for your Neo decentralized identity offering?

It's really been exceptional. This has been the year for that. We have a number of deployments right now of decentralized identity in Neo. It's everything from opening and starting your car, to proving your identity through a bank-issued identity, to proving your identity by a government-issued identity using verifiable credentials in Neo. We protect about 8 billion accounts globally, and so we're in a great position to see the types of use cases that both the private sector and public sector want to deploy by issuing these digital verifiable credentials.

A subset of Neo and decentralized identity is our identity verification service. It's becoming very common now for companies to verify all of their employees before enrolling them in MFA. And that has really taken off, because we're onboarding so many employees remotely, and we don't want to enroll them into strong authentication without verifying their identity before that is done. And so our Verify service, which is very much a part of Neo and our decentralized identity, is really taking off in its own right. The notion that you would verify someone's real identity through their government issued driver's license, passport or Real ID, and then issue them a digital credential afterwards — those two use cases are coupled at the hip. And [performing] the verification as the first step has really taken off in the last 12 months.

What about your expansion into fraud prevention — what sort of momentum have you been finding there?

That is also another capability area that has really taken off in the last year. We offer a service called Protect, which is a set of risk and fraud signals that companies can incorporate into their identity provider and their authentication services to, in essence, make better decisions about [whether to] grant access. Our risk and fraud signals on the workforce side of the equation are eliminating as much as 95 percent of MFA prompts.

Given the major economic uncertainty right now, what can you say about the durability of the opportunity in identity security?

It has historically been a durable category — that's not going to change. It really is not optional. Companies don't have an option when they are doing more business online to ensure that the trust in their brand is not compromised for weaknesses and identity. And that is a security comment. It is also not optional that you compete online in a distance of keystrokes, not in a distance of miles. You're only one or two keystrokes different from your competitor. And so the user experience to compete in an increasingly digital and online or mobile world is also not optional. Ping intersects into both of those. The integrity in your trust and brand is founded on the integrity from which you interact with customers and employees, and the user experience and the personalization is also hinged upon the foundation of your identity platform and your choices there. Everyone is ultimately impacted in [terms of] speed of investment in modernizing their platform. But identity falls into a top one, two or three priority for reasons that predate the economic turmoil over the last couple of months.