Tag Archives: authentication

Ping Identity files for $100M IPO on Nasdaq under the ticker ‘Ping’

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Some eight months after it was reported that Ping Identity’s owners Vista Equity had hired bankers to explore a public listing, today Ping Identity took the plunge: the Colorado-based online ID management company has filed an S-1 form indicating that it plans to raise up to $100 million in an IPO on the Nasdaq exchange under the ticker “Ping.”

While the initial S-1 filing doesn’t have an indication of price range, Ping is said to be looking at a valuation of between $2 billion and $3 billion in this listing.

The company has been around since 2001, founded by Andre Durand (who is still the CEO), and it was acquired by Vista in 2016 for about $600 million — at a time when a clutch of enterprise companies that looked like strong IPO candidates were going the private equity route and staying private instead.

But more recently, there has been a surge in demand for better IT security linked to identity and authentication management, so it seems that Vista Equity is selling up. The PE firm is taking advantage of the fact that the market’s currently very strong for tech IPOs, but there is so much M&A in enterprise right now (just yesterday VMware acquired not one but two companies, Carbon Black for $2.1 billion and Pivotal for $2.7 billion) that I can’t help but wonder if something might move here too.

The S-1 reveals a number of details on the company’s financials, indicating that it’s currently unprofitable but on a steady growth curve. Ping had revenues of $112.9 million in the first six months of 2019, versus $99.5 million in the same period a year before. Its loss has been shrinking in recent years, with a net loss of $3.1 million in the first six months of this year versus $5.8 million a year before (notably in 2017 overall it was profitable with a net income of $19 million. It seems that the change is due to acquisitions and investing for growth).

Its annual run rate, meanwhile, $198 million for the first six months of the year, compared to $159.6 million in the same period a year ago.

The area of identity and access management has become a cornerstone of enterprise IT, with companies looking for efficient and secure ways to centralise how not just their employees, but their customers, their partners and various connected devices on their networks can be authenticated across their cloud and on-premise applications.

The demand for secure solutions covering all the different aspects of a company’s IT stack has grown rapidly over recent years, spurred not just by an increased move to centralised applications served through the cloud, but also by the drastic rise in breaches where malicious hackers have exploited vulnerabilities and loopholes in companies’ sign-on screens.

Ping has been one of the bigger companies building services in this area and tackling all of those use cases, competing with the likes of Okta, OneLogin, AuthO, Cisco, and dozens more off-the-shelf and custom-built solutions.

The company offers its services on an SaaS basis, covering services like secure sign-on, multi-factor authentication, API access security, personalised and unified profile directories, data governance and AI-based security policies. It claims to be the pioneer of “Intelligent Identity”, using AI to help its system analyse user, device and network behavior to better identify potentially malicious activity.

More to come.

 

 


By Ingrid Lunden

Okta introduces ‘Sign in with Okta’ service

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Consider that there are millions of Okta users out there using the service to sign into their company applications with a single set of credentials. Yet getting customers to work together using Okta authentication was an enormous task for developers. Okta wanted to simplify it, so they created a service they are calling it ‘Sign in with Okta.’

The new API allows developers to add a few lines code and give Okta customers the ability to sign into one another’s websites in a similar way that OAuth allows you to use your Google or Facebook credentials to sign onto consumer sites.

Frederic Kerrest, COO and co-founder at Okta, says the ‘Sign in with Okta’ uses an extension of OAuth called OpenID Connect, which his company has been supporting since 2016. He says the new service gives customers the ability to expand the use of their Okta credentials beyond their own set of internal applications to sign into customer and partner sites. This extends the Okta functionality and brand and helps to make it a kind of standard way of logging in (or that’s the hope).

When developers add this functionality, the user sees a “Sign in with Okta” button on the website or service they are accessing. They can then use their Okta login to get into these sites under whatever rules the site owner has defined.

Site with ‘Sign in with Okta’ button. Photo: Okta

While Okta has provided APIs for developers prior to today, they didn’t provide a package like this that simplifies the process. This forced developers to use the SAML standard to make it work. While there’s nothing wrong with this approach, it can be time-consuming and put a lot of burden on developers to write software and connectors, while updating and maintaining them, Kerrest explained. This removes all of that complexity from the process.

This means that when two businesses are on Okta, they can trust one another because they do business together, and instead of setting up the SAML connection, a process that could take days, they can do it an hour with the Okta API tool, according to Kerrest.

“[Sign in with Okta] is a much easier way for customers or partners to seamlessly integrate into our environment. They could do it before, but we are ‘widgetizing’ it now,” he said.


By Ron Miller

Auth0 snags $55M Series D, seeks international expansion

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Auth0, a startup based in Seattle, has been helping developers with a set of APIs to build authentication into their applications for the last five years. It’s raised a fair bit of money along the way to help extend that mission, and today the company announced a $55 million Series D.

This round was led by led by Sapphire Ventures with help from World Innovation Lab, and existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Trinity Ventures, Meritech Capital and K9 Ventures. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $110 million. The company did not want to share its valuation.

CEO Eugenio Pace said the investment should help them expand further internationally. In fact, one of the investors, World Innovation Lab, is based in Japan and should help with their presence there. “Japan is an important market for us and they should help explain to us how the market works there,” he said.

The company offers an easy way for developers to build in authentication services into their applications, also known as Identification as a Service (IDaaS). It’s a lot like Stripe for payments or Twilio for messaging. Instead of building the authentication layer from scratch, they simply add a few lines of code and can take advantage of the services available on the Auth0 platform.

That platform includes a range of service such as single-sign on, two-factor identification, passwordless log-on and breached password detection.

They have a free tier, which doesn’t even require a credit card, and pay tiers based on the types of users — regular versus enterprise — along with the number of users. They also charge based on machine-to-machine authentication. Pace reports they have 3500 paying customers and tens of thousands of users on the free tier.

All of that has added up to a pretty decent business. While Pace would not share specific numbers, he did indicate the company doubled its revenue last year and expected to do so again this year.

With a cadence of getting funding every year for the last three years, Pace says this round may mark the end of that fundraising cycle for a time. He wasn’t ready to commit to the idea of an IPO, saying that is likely a couple of years away, but he says the company is close to profitability.

With the new influx of money, the company does plan to expand its workforce as moves into markets across the world . They currently have 300 employees, but within a year he expects to be between 400 and 450 worldwide.

The company’s last round was a $30 million Series C last June led by Meritech Capital Partners.


By Ron Miller