When talking to developers about their identity problems, the pain point of setting up identity federations with enterprise customers would keep coming up. Our initial focus has been in giving user’s control of their identity, which we thought of as B2C use cases, but as we looked at the B2B problem, we realized your work identity is a big part of your life, and a major pain point for developers.
From an architectural perspective, Hellō is an abstraction layer between identity providers and applications. In B2C, we support 30+ providers, and providing access to all those providers in a single integration to an application developer is a major time saver and simplification. A successful B2B SaaS application may have 100s or 1,000s of integrations, one for each enterprise customers. Setting each of those up is more complex than with a consumer provider such as Apple or Google. Adding Hellō as an abstraction layer turns that into a single integration with Hellō, which can be done in hours, if not minutes.
This is a different approach than CIAM vendors such as Auth0 or WorkOS have taken to help B2B SaaS developers. Those vendors provide a service that implements that federation, but you still have to set up and manage each one. They also offer functionality Hellō does not offer. They manage the user pool for each of your tenants, and offer role based access control functionality. They also support username/ password functionality and MFA. B2B offerings tend to be much more expensive than comparable B2C offerings, but If you need these extra features, they are a good value.
The Hellō approach allows us to provide a disruptive pricing model for basic SSO.
Free.
We believe there should not be a financial barrier for a developer to offer an enterprise of any size to have SSO for their SaaS applications. As an enterprise’s identity management model matures and they want to have a managed app and de-provisioning, we will charge for that enhanced functionality.
The Hellō B2B functionality is available now to any Hellō application. We currently support managed accounts from Google, Microsoft, and Zoho. To learn more about how the technical details check out this hello.dev post.
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