Today, Ping Identity announced the acquisition of UnboundID. The two companies have been partnering already for a while, with a number of joint customers. After the recent acquisition of Ping Identity by Vista Equity Partners, a private equity firm, this first acquisition of Ping Identity can be seen as the result of the new setup of the company. The initial announcement by Vista Equity Partners already included the information that both organic and inorganic – as now has happened with UnboundID – growth is planned.

The acquisition of UnboundID is interesting from two perspectives. One concerns the capabilities of the UnboundID Platform in managing identity data at scale and to capture, store, sync, and aggregate data from a variety of sources such as directories, CRM systems, and others. The other involves the capabilities UnboundID provides for multi-channel customer engagement. This, for example, includes an analytics engine for analyzing customer behavior trends.

Combined with the proven strength of Ping Identity in the Identity Federation and Access Management market, this allows the companies to extend their offering particularly towards the currently massively growing market of CIAM (Customer Identity and Access Management). Furthermore, the technical platform that Ping Identity provides is complemented with an underlying large scale directory and synchronization service.

Due to the fact that both companies have been working closely together for a while, we expect that existing and new customers will benefit rapidly from Ping Identity’s expanded offering.