Tuesday, 11 March 2008

Ping Identity Acquires Sxip Access SaaS Business from Sxip Identity

In the past year, I've come to appreciate something many CEO's at one point learn in their careers. And that is, there are stages in the growth of a business, which though not exciting, are normal, and are in fact indicative of growing viability and maturity. The stimulation so abundant by default with a startup, simply gives way over time to a different sort of reward, that of doing something really well, repeatedly, and satisfying the needs of your customers, one customer at a time. Building a real business requires that you never tire of simply listening to customers and committing to their support after the initial sale. This stage entails a lot of patience and endurance.

Every once in a while however, an opportunity comes along that allows you to really accelerate your business. In the six years that I've dedicated myself to Ping Identity, I've only seen a few of these opportunities, but none so aligned with what we were trying to achieve here at Ping Identity as today's announcement.

So it's with great pleasure that we announce the acquisition of the Sxip Access business from Sxip Identity.

The Sxip Access business consists of:
- the single sign-on, provisioning and de-provisioning software,
- appliance
- and hosted services of Sxip Identity,

All of these assets serve enterprises using software-as-a-service applications.

The acquisition will strengthen our relationship with existing Sxip Access partners such as salesforce.com and Google, and will accelerate our commitment to enabling secure SSO to SaaS providers, an area we believe enterprises increasingly will value as they extend their identity and security infrastructures to encompass these new services.

I've known Dick Hardt the founder and CEO of Sxip Identity for several years now, and have a tremendous amount of respect for his intelligence, fortitude and contributions to the education and protocol development of identity industry. He has single handedly educated the universe of people beyond the identity ecosphere with his world-class presentation on Identity 2.0, something I feel Ping Identity and many others in this industry should be very thankful for.

As part of the acquisition, we will take over the existing customer relationships and support contracts of Sxip Access users, and will work with these businesses, and our existing PingFederate customers, to understand how the new Sxip Access software, appliance and hosted technology can help solve a growing portion of their immediate and future problems.

Also worth mentioning is that while the opportunity to acquire both customers and technology was certainly attractive, none of these would have been of value to us without the opportunity to work with the talented people behind the technology, sales and support. The opportunity to hire and work with these individuals is highly valued, and our new team members will no doubt help us manage and grow the business in the coming months.

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