DENVER, Colo. -- Ping Identity Corporation announced today that its award-winning federated identity server, PingFederate 4, has passed the Liberty Alliance SAML 2.0 conformance test conducted in July 2006 and has been awarded the Liberty Alliance Interoperable mark. PingFederate is the only standalone federated identity server with support for SAML 2.0, SAML 1.x and WS-Federation to be certified following this latest round of conformance testing. The Liberty Alliance Interoperable mark offers assurance to customers that the product they select is truly interoperable out-of-the-box, shortening deployment cycles, increasing productivity and saving costs.

“Conformance to industry standards is absolutely essential for identity federation products, as federation partners generally make their software decisions independently. Vendors’ products must implement industry standards like SAML 2.0 properly to ensure interoperability”, said Patrick Harding, CTO, Ping Identity Corporation. “The Liberty Alliance provides an invaluable service to all vendors and end users in this industry by sponsoring these tests. Their ‘Interoperable’ mark provides prospective users with a level of interoperability assurance that can only come from an independent third-party testing organization.”

The Liberty conformance program requires that each company successfully complete tests against scripts and scenarios prepared by and published on the Liberty Alliance Web site. The program requires repeated operation of the Liberty specification’s core features in many combinations and sequences and in different roles and contexts common to real-world deployments. The federation testing covered federation establishment and termination, single sign-on, opaque name registration, affiliation, identity provider proxies and anonymous login. PingFederate 4 proved conformance following a rigorous testing process including the demonstration of interoperability with SAML 2.0 federated identity products from two other randomly selected vendors.

Ping Identity Corp.