Scaling with Focus: Why Midships Chose Ping and Keycloak
- Ajit Gupta
- Nov 2, 2025
- 4 min read
As a bootstrap founder, we have to constantly balance growth and risk. Over the past year, we’ve gone through significant internal change (for the better), and it gave me an opportunity to tackle a risk that has kept me up many nights. I thought it might be helpful to share this experience and would love any feedback.
Each year, I try to mitigate one major risk that could lead to a company-ending event. As a bootstrapped startup, our resources are limited, and I learned early that tackling multiple existential risks at once is unrealistic.
In the early years, we faced several big ones:
Geography
Industry
Capability
Leadership
Partner dependency
Our goal has always been to ensure that Midships can withstand shocks in one or two of these areas. Today, we operate across multiple geographies and industries (though we still have more work to do on diversification). We’ve expanded our competence through team growth and delivery excellence, and we’ve built a broader leadership team so that Midships can continue to thrive even without its founders.
From day one, we’ve been fortunate to partner with ForgeRock and later Ping. Midships has grown alongside them, building deep, meaningful relationships. But in recent years, it became clear that we had become heavily dependent on Ping. While that isn’t inherently a problem — things are going well — it’s still a risk. And as a business, we’re ambitious. We want to grow faster.
Ping has been generous in introducing us to customers, but to truly scale into the business I envision Midships becoming, we needed to build our own pipelines. Midships is an IAM-specialised company, and we take pride in our 100% delivery success rate. With a stronger team and proven capability, the time came to broaden our offering — by adding another product that complements Ping while staying true to our philosophy:
Depth is our differentiation. Focus is our strategy.
We continuously monitor the IAM landscape and noticed rising customer interest in Keycloak. When we looked closer, it made sense.
Why Ping
For proprietary IAM suites, we believe Ping is the best. Over the years, Ping has evolved into a unified digital identity platform — covering everything from identity provider (IDP), verifiable credentials (distributed identity), and eKYC, to behavioral risk, workforce management, intelligent authorization, and even PAM. There’s more to come, and it’s exciting.
Ping is a one-stop shop for enterprises seeking coverage, depth, and simplicity. Many organisations want to simplify their IAM footprint and move toward platform consolidation, and Ping offers this better than any other product suite. Enterprises no longer want to stitch ten products together — they want integrated solutions that just work.
And let’s not forget: IAM isn’t just IDP. It includes IGA, distributed credentials, eKYC, behavioral biometrics, PAM, and more.
We’ve evaluated nearly every major proprietary IAM platform in the market. None offered the same breadth, stability, or maturity as Ping. For organisations that need scale, compliance, and an end-to-end ecosystem, Ping simply leads.
Why Keycloak
Keycloak stands out too. It’s the strongest open-source identity platform available, with confirmed enterprise support from Red Hat, a distinct licensing model compared to most IAM vendors, and strong extensibility for complex use cases. It has also helped that several of our customers have specifically enquired about Keycloak — as a systems integrator, we take that kind of market signal seriously.
It’s ideal for organisations that want modularity and control, and are willing to invest more effort in integration. With the right design, it enables a multi-vendor IAM approach — one where you can plug in PingOne or other vendor solutions, and focus investment on enhancements that drive real business value rather than on the commoditised IDP layer.
The Strategic Balance
For us, this isn’t about choosing between open source and proprietary. It’s about alignment — matching each customer’s needs with the right technology, while ensuring our own business model remains defensible.
Ping gives us a foundation for enterprise-scale delivery. Keycloak gives us flexibility for open architectures. Together, they give us range without dilution.
The CEO View
As a leader, my goal is simple — to grow Midships while managing and reducing risk. That means deep partnerships, deliberate focus, and clear technology bets.
By building our capabilities around Ping and Keycloak, we’ve chosen depth over breadth and clarity over convenience. It’s the kind of decision that doesn’t just define what we deliver — it shapes who we become as a company.
Would love to hear how other founders and leaders are managing focus and risk in their scale-up journeys.
Writer’s Overview
Ajit Gupta – Co-Founder & CEO, Midships
Ajit leads Midships Group’s transition from a specialist identity consultancy to a portfolio of autonomous, AI-native business units. He focuses on long-term business relevance through platform thinking, customer outcomes, and scalable operating models.
Short bio: Ajit is a strategic founder with deep expertise in IAM, platform delivery, and AI services, driving Midships’ expansion across Asia, the Middle East, and beyond.
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