Keycloak, and Our Commitment to Open Source Identity and Access Management (IAMs) and Open Source Keycloak Extensions

Following the initial release of Phase Two's authentication and SSO tools 3 months ago, we had a warm reception by several early- to mid- stage SaaS companies. The message was consistent. SSO was a key barrier to unlocking enterprise customers, and we had made it much easier to quickly integrate the alphabet-soup of enterprise identity providers, including Auth0, Okta, and many others.

Furthermore, many of our customers have responded well to our "[one price per project]"(/#pricing) idea, citing that competitors and other enterprise authentication companies had pricing models that ramped on a per-user and per-SSO connection basis, making them economically unattractive to companies with business and pricing models that couldn't support that.

One of the other points that we heard loud and clear from our first customers, was the fear of vendor lock-in. Integrating tools like this can be a large effort, and can be difficult to unwind if the terms or service fall short. While our adoption of standards such as OpenID and SAML allayed some of those fears, we wanted to go a step further.

We built the initial verison of Phase Two as a set of extensions to the Keycloak Open Source Identity and Access Management system, built and maintained by Red Hat. After several months of developing for it, and operating it for our customers, we've decided to commit to being a premium Keycloak hosting and support solution. Keycloak has been battle-tested and hardened for over 6 years. It's security and reliability is depended on by organizations from small startups to Fortune 500 companies and governments. Our hosted Keycloak offering will allow teams and organizations to focus on rapidly implementing Identity and Access Management.

To put to rest any future concerns about vendor lock-in, we're committing to making our core extensions to Keycloak open source. This includes open source enterprise single sign-on, authentication, and user management. Phase Two simple to use, operate and scale, we will maintain compatibility so that customers can migrate to their own Keycloak deployment. Updates and links to our open source extensions will be published in the Open Source section of the documentation, and will be available in our p2-inc GitHub organization page.

We have benefitted immensely from the open source communitiy, and we are excited to give back!