Release budget for AI from customer identity spend.
Customer identity is essential. The premium you pay should earn its place. Assess whether Midships Keycloak could meet your security, resilience and operational requirements at a lower total cost. Account for migration and running both platforms during the transition, then establish what budget you could release, and when.
Challenge the licence cost. Keep the requirements.
A lower licence bill is not enough. The alternative must meet your customer identity requirements, and the full cost of moving and operating it must justify the change.
Midships Keycloak is a production customer identity platform operated in your own environment, priced on the deployment scope we agree rather than on the number of customers who sign in. Our calculator uses upper planning figures for a typical enterprise scope.
Assess the complete service: implementation, operations, support, and the responsibilities your organisation retains.
What could you release, and when?
Compare the cost of staying on your current platform with the cost of moving to Midships Keycloak, including ongoing service costs, migration and the period when both platforms run.
Illustrative example using the calculator's default figures: $2.1 million a year in current licence and support, six months of dual running, and Midships upper planning figures. Not a customer result, a quotation or a commitment to savings.
Four questions before you renew.
- What are you paying for? Establish your current licence, support and operating costs, the capabilities you use, and the terms of your next renewal.
- Can the alternative meet your requirements? Validate security, resilience, integrations, customer journeys and operational responsibilities. Open standards alone do not establish equivalence.
- What will the transition really cost? Include migration, integration changes, testing, internal effort, dual running and any extension with your current vendor.
- What budget becomes available, and when? Compare annual and cumulative costs. Identify the initial funding requirement, the year the balance turns positive, and the assumptions that could change the result.
Assess the architecture, not just the feature list.
Customer login runs on open standards, OpenID Connect, OAuth 2.0 and SAML, and Keycloak, an open-source project in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, supports them [1]. Shared standards do not make every identity platform equivalent. Availability depends on the database, network, infrastructure and failover design, and the deployer is responsible for validating the complete architecture [2].
Assess availability, recovery, integrations, security controls and operational ownership. The decision should rest on your requirements and the full business case, not on licence cost alone.
Put released budget to work.
Where the business case supports a move, the budget released could support AI investment or other priorities. Assess that investment separately, against its own outcomes, costs and risks. See how Midships approaches governed AI, or estimate an exception-handling case.
Assess the options before you renew.
Bring your current costs, renewal date and key requirements. In a free initial conversation we will look at the potential alternative, the transition considerations and whether a fuller business case is justified.