Akamai Technologies (NASDAQ: AKAM), the intelligent edge platform for securing and delivering digital experiences, today announces the company has entered into an agreement to acquire Janrain, the company that pioneered the customer identity access management (CIAM) category. Janrain enables enterprises to enhance digital trust by offloading login and registration workloads, and its integration with Akamai’s Intelligent Edge Platform is expected to provide world class security, regulatory compliance and massive scale to online engagements.
As enterprises continue to adopt cloud technologies and digitize their businesses, web security and identity awareness have become increasingly integral to keeping businesses safe and secure and establishing digital trust. Akamai already secures its customers’ websites, apps and APIs from DDoS attacks, application vulnerabilities, bots and other advanced threats, with hundreds of millions of login transactions taking place daily on the Akamai Intelligent Edge Platform. The acquisition is expected to add critical complementary capability that will help Akamai’s customers establish and maintain digital trust with their users by providing a highly secure and resilient environment for collecting and storing sensitive user information, managing privacy controls, defending against identity fraud, and improving engagement and brand loyalty.
“It is challenging to conduct business online without an inherent and expected level of digital trust,” said Rick McConnell, president of Akamai Technologies and general manager of Akamai’s web division. “Janrain’s Identity Cloud, working together with Akamai’s Intelligent Edge Platform, will provide an added layer of security to allow our customers to know more about their end users and potentially drive additional revenues from that deepened relationship.”
Integrating Janrain’s Identity Cloud into the Akamai Intelligent Edge Platform is expected to provide immediate security benefits to CIAM customers in two critical areas: bot management and threat intelligence. Akamai Bot Manager mitigates the risks associated with credential abuse by detecting and managing bot activity at login and registration time and reducing fraud without negatively impacting the user experience. By leveraging Akamai threat intelligence, customers can make smart decisions about which users should be allowed to access registration and login pages based on reputation built on past online behaviour.
The integrated technology will also be designed to enable highly accurate, scalable, and secure risk-based adaptive authentication solutions to safeguard against malicious account activities including fraudulent account creation and credential compromise.
“Janrain has been focused on creating an innovative solution for establishing digital trust through authentication and authorization for each individual consumer and even connected devices that interact with a digital enterprise,” said Jim Kaskade, chief executive officer, Janrain. “By combining the scale and intelligence of Akamai’s Intelligent Edge Platform with Janrain’s Identity Cloud, we believe we can realize the promise of delivering a more accurate and sophisticated customer identity management solution and enable trusted digital experiences that are unique for every user.”
Janrain is a privately-funded company headquartered in Portland, Oregon. The all-cash transaction is expected to close early in the first quarter of 2019. Akamai anticipates the Janrain acquisition to be slightly dilutive to its non-GAAP net income per share for 2019, in the range of $0.05 to $0.06, and to become accretive in 2020. The acquisition is not expected to impact Akamai’s previously-stated goal of achieving a non-GAAP operating margin of 30% by 2020.
