Digital identity is the lifeblood of every organisation because it is both the entry point, and gateway to great user experiences.
Ping Identity’s platform is a one-stop shop for managing identities, access, and governance. The company works with enterprise organisations to manage more than eight billion digital identities around the world to deliver best-in-class customer experiences combined with uncompromising security through its AI-driven platform. Ping helps these organisations protect their employees and customers from significant challenges such as fraud, data breaches and account takeovers.
Matthew Row is the Global SS&P Director at Ping Identity. Like many before him, Row fell into procurement by accident and even had to ask what procurement was after being offered a graduate role in the function. “Since then, I’ve had so much fun delivering business transformation from building cost management in financial services after the financial crisis to establishing greenfield procurement functions in rapidly growing technology companies,” he tells us. “The most recent experience is in building SS&P functions in private equity owned technology companies over the last five years. I’ve had fun taking the best practice I’ve learned from working in leading SS&P functions in the FTSE100 and pragmatically applying this in smaller technology companies. It’s enabled me to deliver award winning SS&P functions rapidly by rightsizing the function for the business and enabling it to scale rapidly as the business grows.”
Upon joining Ping in May 2022, Row was presented with a blank canvas and tasked with building the company’s SS&P function from the ground up. Row built a function that won the 2023 CIPS award for Procurement Function of the Year – Small Business.
Navigating a merger
In order to scale the award-winning SS&P function, Row needed to build a wider team. The combination of Ping Identity and ForgeRock in August 2023 paved the way for change where two SS&P teams became one with immediate effect following no previous engagement between the functions. Two employees from each function formed a SS&P team of four and were tasked with finding one unified way of working. “On day one, we had two separate technology stacks, processes and approaches,” explains Row. “For the first three months, it was about keeping the show on the road and continuing to run both approaches to keep the business functioning. We rapidly established a single SS&P function in parallel underpinned by the launch of ORO Labs as the single purchasing system.”
Blended team
Brenton McClure, Senior Manager, Strategic Sourcing at Ping Identity, believes the two SS&P teams that collided together complemented each other well. “It was the perfect blend because I felt like some of the specific areas of our functions had progressed more than others,” he says. “At ForgeRock, the procurement area was very strong, while from a legacy Ping perspective, sourcing was robust. It was the perfect combination.” McClure explains that one of the biggest challenges was that there had been no planning. In a normal scenario pre-combination, teams might meet prior to a company-wide move to strategise. However, in the case of Ping and ForgeRock, it was a case of finding a way to make it work on the fly.
“What really helped us was the SS&PP Director’s high level of emotional intelligence,” says McClure. “Those early days can be pretty tense, but our team really came together quickly and then a lot of the business followed on quite quickly as well.” Supporting this, Jason Jago, Manager, International Procurement at Ping Identity says, “It’s been a difficult and, at points, uncertain journey to get to where the team is. Two companies in the same sector, but with two very different ways of working. Perseverance and patience have brought the function to where it is now, and it will bring us to where we aspire to be.”
Talent management
People are an essential cog in the machine. Without a robust workforce, a business is doomed to fail. With two SS&P functions transforming into one, creating the right culture to blend two different teams together was key. “We structured the team around the award-winning strengths of each sub function from the previous businesses, focusing on strategic sourcing and procurement,” explains Row. “The team has been the secret ingredient in the success of this function.”
The scale of delivery over the past 12 months has created market-leading growth opportunities for each member of the Ping Identity team. Procurement has been focused on building the foundations of the function from scratch in just a few months and sourcing has been focused on driving approximately four to five years of value delivery within a single year. While the focus on internal customer success also led to five company awards for the SS&P team as well as specific individuals in the first three months after the combination of businesses. The team was strongly recognised by the business as being a critical enabler in a challenging time when many functions were still forming.
Award-winning culture
“We won five company awards in those initial few months and it was really important to us,” says Row. “Our company is absolutely customer-obsessed and for us as a function, we are the same with an obsession on internal customer success. It’s about making sure we work closely with the business, build future plans with them and enable their success. We also heavily invest in our people where the whole team have become SIG certified sourcing professionals.”
Ping has a unique culture that emphasises the focus on nurturing and retaining top talent. The combination of businesses created a once-in-a-career opportunity for many people to build experience in integration and develop a combined function from scratch. Ping has huge ambitions to become the most admired identity company which creates a very fast-paced, challenging and fun working environment. Ping is determined to continue to create huge growth opportunities for talent as growth and new focus areas emerge.
Cecilia Mishkevich, Specialist, Strategic Sourcing at Ping Identity, adds the company’s secret sauce revolves around the positive culture. “Being so new and going through a business combination can be a daunting prospect but everyone was always so willing to help,” says Mishkevich. “That proved to me that even in really tough times, the culture here perseveres.” Jago supports these comments stating, “My motivation stems from belief in this industry, what Ping is now and what it will become. I feel privileged to be a part of its story. The company is full of bright and caring people, you can’t help but want to give 100% for Ping.”
Ping Identity: A closer look
- Ambition – To be the most admired identity company on the planet.
- Mission – Become the leading provider of CIAM serving the Global 5000. The aim is to become the best in the world, the most innovative, the most reliable, the most trusted and the most admired.
- How – Deliver on its vision of one platform for all identity use-cases, but outshine the competition when it comes to the customer identity access management (CIAM) use-case through its innovation, scale, performance, reliability, resiliency and customer service.
ORO Labs Technology
Ping Identity leverages ORO Labs technology in a bid to scale efficiency. Following the business combination, Ping consolidated two technologies Smartsheet and Tipalti into a single process and funnelled all spend through the ORO platform. ORO Labs is the procurement orchestration platform for modern companies and is on a mission to make processes better, faster and more agile in procurement and supply chain. And Row stresses that ORO’s technology has underpinned the journey for his organisation.
“With two technology stacks and processes to organise into a single operating model, ORO was the technology that we consolidated onto, and it has underpinned the delivery of enormous value,” explains Row. “Everything went through that platform, and it was chosen as the starting point to ensure we could move towards a best practice. There’s no doubt it has delivered value and improved our timescales. The balancing factor is that it has been an awful lot of work for the team. The key benefit is that it is a highly configurable solution but that is also its biggest challenge too. Ultimately, it has underpinned our journey, and I can’t dispute the influence it has had.”
Tech power
Mishkevich agrees with Row about the significant value the technology generates, however, adds that it can be time-consuming to execute. “It’s a great tool, but it takes a lot of time and effort to implement successfully,” she explains. “Even beyond the nine months that it’s been live, it has also been about making sure it was running smoothly. It has delivered really strong benefits for the team in terms of improving efficiencies and we’ve got great feedback internally on the user interface and the simplicity of it. It’s just a matter of this SS&P team managing the backend function, and when there are things that need to be improved, that’s where it gets a bit painful. From my perspective, that will all come in time.”
McClure adds the technology is so configurable that when the business combination happened, the team was building around two NetSuite environments. “That system was determining which purchases would go where depending on location and what legacy business,” explains McClure. “If we had had a less configurable solution, I don’t know if we would’ve been able to get to one unified process as quickly. It’s driven a ton of value. We’ve reduced a lot of our cycle times for processing and ORO has played a big part in that. There’s so much you can do so it’s about staying focused on the right things and ensuring what you have set up is scaleable. When your CEO is saying the goal is to double the size of the business, you have to make sure that everything is bolted down properly.”
Procurement transformation
Benchmarking completed by Row has confirmed the function is in the top quartile of companies in its sector, demonstrating 2x – 3x the efficiency and 3x – 4x the value delivery of the average company. This has been achieved through a purchase cycle times reduction of 80%+, 50%+ reduction in vendors, significant cost optimisation, 2x improvement in internal customer satisfaction scores and robust risk management securing outstanding feedback from customer audits. The reasons for this are four-fold and down to the process, system, business enablement and team.
“It’s because of a robust and repeatable process which is leveraging a tiering system to appropriately treat all spend types. The tiering system drives intake, commercial negotiations, due diligence, onboarding and ongoing vendor management activities in a repeatable way,” reveals Row. “The ORO system has enabled all spend to flow through a single system, configured in alignment with the process. Thirdly, business partnering has been important to proactively build shared business plans. Lastly, a highly efficient team that are focused on their strengths.”
McClure adds that the organisation is truly customer-centric and always strives to put clients first. “We bend over backwards for our customers,” he says. “Companies talk about being customer-first all the time, and then they’re really not, but we truly are at Ping and that is true all the way up to our CEO.”
Ping Identity’s SS&P team
- Matthew Row, Global Strategic Sourcing & Procurement Director, Ping Identity
- Brenton McClure, Senior Manager, Strategic Sourcing, Ping Identity
- Cecilia Mishkevich, Specialist, Strategic Sourcing, Ping Identity
- Jason Jago, Manager, International Procurement, Ping Identity
Key partnerships
In order to achieve long-term success, no company can go it alone. The importance of establishing and retaining key, strategic partnerships is essential to thrive in today’s world. As such, Ping has formed several robust alliances, including AWS and Google, in its bid to become the most admired identity company globally.
“As part of the business combination, we went line by line through all requirements and selected the preferred strategic vendors that aligned with our ambitions for all requirements across the combined business, consolidating all of the legacy vendors into that single strategic vendor,” reveals Row. “Many of these vendors are subprocessors or critical subcontractors, meaning they underpin the product that we offer to our end customers. They have a huge impact on our ability to deliver amazing products and services to end customers. To meet our goals, we need these partners to share our level of ambition and fully commit to this. These strategic vendors are now a critical part of our journey supporting Ping Identity to become a growing and profitable combined company.”
But for any partnership to be sustainable, both organisations must align and maintain a shared vision. According to Row, this comes down to focusing on a common set of strategic goals, particularly with an emphasis on customer outcomes. “It is important to form strong relationships across the executive teams to ensure the partnership truly addresses those priorities,” he says. “It is also key to focus on establishing market-leading products and therefore partners are chosen based on their ability to enable us to deliver this.”
Future plans
Looking ahead, 2025 is expected to be another big year of growth for Ping. The SS&P team is focused on engaging in critical business programmes as a strategic partner to deliver the best outcomes. “The future is big. In terms of the company, it feels like we’ve got an explosive opportunity right in front of us,” explains Row. “This is underpinned by the incredible ambition from our Board and CEO. I’m expecting a big year next year for Ping as a company, but then when that comes down to us as a function, I’m thoroughly expecting us to have a heavy lift on the strategic projects that underpin that.”
