The Objective

As one of the world’s largest distributors of IT products and services, Tech Data provides extensive product lines, logistics capabilities, and value-added services to more than 105,000 resellers who deploy IT solutions.

The e-commerce giant offers a self-service portal for its partners, who use the portal to perform a vital range of tasks like checking inventory and viewing credit line statuses. Tech Data wanted to deliver a frictionless experience for customers and vendor partners. But to do so, it needed to replace an antiquated system that no longer supported the complex needs of the business.

The Challenge

Tech Data faced numerous challenges. It needed a secure system that gives a complete and consolidated view of each user so that it wouldn't become the next target for breach. A cumbersome legacy system required redundant sign-on attempts. The company needed to integrate with third-party vendors while supporting open standards. And, limited scalability inhibited customer preference and profile management options.

The Solution

After Toth researched solutions to overhaul the portal, the Ping Identity Platform was the obvious choice. Federated single sign-on (SSO) allows Tech Data’s third-party vendors to easily manage and authenticate its end-users in a highly secure way.

With PingDirectory, Tech Data is also able to store relationship information that spans multiple business partnerships with its users. “The Ping team came in and spoke to us at great length about the capabilities,” Toth said. “We stood up an internal POC inside Tech Data. They came in and did a streamlined version of what we were trying to do in under two weeks, which no other supplier was willing to do.”

Because Tech Data is a multi-national company with business and IT stakeholders worldwide, Toth needed to pitch the Ping Identity Platform as a global solution. He got alignment across the European and U.S. e-commerce folks, the global IT security team, and the CIO. From there, Toth said, the decision was easy.