Going big in Silicon Valley: Denver's Ping Identity leads booming cloud-security market.

• Author: Peterson, Eric
• Position: QUARTERLY TECH REPORT - Company overview

As he embarks on what might well be Ping Identity's final funding push, Andre Durand, CEO and founder of Denver's Ping Identity, has relocated his family to work from California for the first six months of 2013. "I'm getting schooled in the ways of Silicon Valley," he says. "It really is pretty astounding. It's go big or go home.'"

That credo currently applies to Ping Identity as well. The company, founded by Durand in 2002, has emerged as the largest IT-security firm in the country with more than $50 million in annual revenues, 300 employees and 900 customers--primarily enterprises with a minimum of 1,000 employees and the requisite data center.

But the market doesn't begin and end with enterprise customers. Ping Identity supports businesses of all sizes in their quest to make the cloud an impervious environment for an increasingly mobile work force and customer base. The company's CloudDesktop provides users a secure, single sign-on, whether they're at the office on the road or on the beach.

Durand describes the all-too-common problem Ping Identity solves in terms of "the seven layers of the Internet," specifically the app layer that's next to the network layer. "What's missing in the middle is this thing called identity," he says.

The problem dates back to the dawn of the Web. Vinton Cerf, sometimes referred to as "the inventor of the Internet," was asked what he would have done differently when he first networked computers in 1973. "He said. 'I would have solved identity,'" says Durand.

"You have the cut in. IT security industry because of that decision in 1973." he continues. "When the Internet was invented identity was not solved, so every application has its own notion of security."

This was no big deal in the mainframe era. "Thirty years ago, the concept of computer security was physical security," says Durand. "You locked the door behind the terminal. If you were inside, you had access to the terminal. There was no network." Identity was not so much of an issue in that environment.

In 2013, it's a whole new world. Everything is networked, from phones to data centers, and identity is perhaps the biggest headache for companies operating in this environment. In the consumer world, Web-surfers are enjoying single sign-on through Facebook and other social networks and want the same ease when logging in at work.

Standards for online identity began emerging a little more than 10 years ago, following the emergence of SMTP as the standard...