Vendor lineage
Ping Identity
Bet early that identity would have to work between organisations, not just inside one.
Andre Durand founded Ping Identity in Denver in 2002, on a bet that looks obvious now and did not then: that the hard identity problem was not authenticating your own staff but letting one organisation's users into another organisation's applications without either side sharing a password database.
Federation is the answer, and the standards that make it work - SAML, and later OAuth and OpenID Connect - were being written at roughly the moment the company was founded. Ping built products against them early, and became one of the vendors whose implementations defined what interoperability meant in practice.
The idea underneath is worth stating because it is easy to miss: an assertion signed by a party you trust is better than a credential you have to store. It moves the security problem from protecting secrets to verifying signatures, and every single-sign-on deployment since rests on that trade.
Ownership has changed repeatedly. Vista Equity Partners took it private in 2016, it returned to public markets in 2019, and Thoma Bravo took it private again in 2022 - the same firm that appears elsewhere on this timeline holding Sophos and LANDESK.
In 2023 Thoma Bravo acquired ForgeRock and combined it with Ping, bringing together two of the largest independent identity vendors, and giving the combined portfolio two overlapping product lines to reconcile.
Founding stories
Ping Identity
Andre Durand had already given the internet an open messaging protocol - he founded Jabber, whose XMPP lineage Cisco acquired in 2008 - when he turned to a harder federation problem: identity. Ping Identity, founded in Denver in 2002 with Bryan Field-Elliot, bet that businesses would need to trust each other's logins across organizational lines, and became a standard-bearer for SAML and the federation protocols that followed. Two decades later the company Durand still leads anchors identity for more than half of the Fortune 100.
ForgeRock
When Oracle closed its acquisition of Sun Microsystems in January 2010 and suspended Sun's open-source identity work, five of the engineers who had built it refused to let it die. In February 2010 they founded ForgeRock in Norway - on famously little seed money - and forked the stack they knew line by line: OpenSSO became OpenAM, the directory lineage became OpenDJ, and OpenIDM and OpenIG grew alongside, maturing into the ForgeRock Identity Platform. It is one of open source's great lifeboat stories: a corporate roadmap decision undone by the people who had written the code, who then took the rescued product all the way to the New York Stock Exchange.
The timeline
- Founded on federation
Ping starts in Denver with a thesis years ahead of its market: single sign-on should cross company boundaries, carried by open standards rather than shared passwords.
- PingFederate
The flagship federation server, and the product that made the argument concrete: an identity provider on one side, a service provider on the other, and a signed assertion crossing between two organisations that share no directory. It became the enterprise workhorse for connecting workforces and partners to applications, and the reference implementation many integrations were tested against.
- Sun Microsystems open-sources OpenSSO
The other bloodline begins: Sun releases its Java System Access Manager heritage as the OpenSSO open-source project - iPlanet and Sun ONE DNA, now developed in the open. The Sun directory lineage travels with it.
ForgeRock's own AM deployment-planning history.
- ForgeRock: the fork that saved Sun's identity stack
Oracle completes the Sun acquisition in January 2010 and suspends OpenSSO. In February, five former Sun engineers found ForgeRock in Norway to carry the code forward: OpenSSO is reborn as OpenAM, the directory as OpenDJ, with OpenIDM and OpenIG joining - the seeds of the ForgeRock Identity Platform.
Company records give February 2010; the Norwegian entity ForgeRock AS was incorporated in October 2009.
- Vista takes the company private
June 2016: Vista Equity Partners acquires majority ownership for roughly $600 million, funding the expansion from federation into a full identity platform - MFA, access management, directory, and the PingOne cloud.
- IPO on the NYSE
September 2019: Ping lists on the New York Stock Exchange as PING - three years as a public company that end the way much of the identity market's decade did, in private equity hands.
- ForgeRock IPO: FORG
September 16, 2021: eleven years and about $233.7 million in funding after the fork, ForgeRock lists on the New York Stock Exchange, popping roughly 44 percent on day one at a valuation around $2 billion - the rescued open-source stack, ringing the bell.
- Thoma Bravo, $2.8 billion
October 18, 2022: Thoma Bravo completes its all-cash take-private of Ping at $28.50 per share - one piece of the firm's identity buying spree alongside SailPoint and, days earlier in agreement, ForgeRock.
Thoma Bravo press release.
- ForgeRock folds in
August 23, 2023: Thoma Bravo closes the ~$2.3 billion ForgeRock acquisition and combines it into Ping the same day, uniting two Access Management Magic Quadrant Leaders under Durand - a merger of direct rivals executed in about a hundred days.
Thoma Bravo press release; both firms Leaders in Gartner's 2023 Access Management MQ.
- One platform, both heritages
The combined company rationalizes overlapping portfolios without forced migrations: PingOne and the ForgeRock lineage continue side by side, with orchestration (DaVinci) as the connective tissue across workforce and customer identity.
- My chapterMy chapter
PingFederate Practitioner in 2025 through Ping Identity Training, and the identity chapter opening in 2026 - the protocols this hub covers are the ones that carry the rest of the portfolio.
Flagship products and solutions
- PingFederateThe enterprise federation server - SAML, OAuth, and OpenID Connect brokering for workforce and partner single sign-on; the product this site's identity tooling most often speaks to.
- PingOneThe cloud identity platform: SSO, MFA (PingID), risk, and identity verification delivered as SaaS.
- PingOne DaVinciNo-code identity orchestration - the visual journey builder (from the Singular Key acquisition) that stitches authentication, risk, and fraud signals into flows.
- PingAccess and PingDirectoryWeb/API access enforcement and the high-scale directory underpinning large deployments.
- ForgeRock Identity Platform (Advanced Identity Cloud)The ForgeRock heritage carried forward post-merger: Access Management, Identity Management, Directory Services, and Identity Gateway - the OpenAM, OpenIDM, OpenDJ, and OpenIG lineages, with journey Trees for orchestration.
Key innovations
- Federation as a productTurning SAML from a specification into dependable enterprise software - Ping's founding contribution, and why 'PingFederate' became close to a common noun in identity work.
- Identity orchestrationDaVinci's journey-time orchestration - assembling authentication and fraud checks visually - one of the capabilities analysts singled out across both Ping and ForgeRock.
- Open source as a lifeboatForgeRock's founding move - forking OpenSSO and OpenDS the month Oracle shelved them - remains a canonical proof that open licensing lets a community outlive a corporate roadmap.
- The identity roll-upThe Ping-ForgeRock combination: proof that even head-to-head IAM rivals could be merged into one platform company without forcing customer migrations.
Main markets
Ping competes at the top of workforce and customer identity and access management against Microsoft and Okta, concentrated in large, complex enterprises - banks, carriers, governments - where hybrid deployment, standards depth, and orchestration decide the deal.
Analyst standing
- Ping Identity and ForgeRock were each named Leaders in Gartner's 2023 Access Management Magic Quadrant - the year Thoma Bravo combined them into a single company.