INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
At the Identiverse conference in Boston today, Ping Identityannounced that it has acquired Elastic Beam, a pre-Series A startup that uses
artificial intelligence to monitor APIs and help understand when they have been compromised.
Ping also announced a new product,
PingIntelligence for APIs, based on the Elastic Beam technology
They did not disclose the sale price.
The product itself is a pretty nifty piece of technology
It automatically detects all the API IP addresses and URLs running inside a customer
It then uses artificial intelligence to search for anomalous behavior and report back when it finds it (or it can automatically shut down
access depending on how it configured).
&APIs are defined either in the API gateway because that facilitates creation or implemented on an
application server like node.js
We created a platform that could bring a level of protection to both,& company founder Bernard Harguindeguy told TechCrunch.
It may seem
like an odd match for Ping, which after all, is an enterprise identity company, but there are reasonable connections here
Perhaps the biggest is that CEO Andre Durand wants to see his company making increasing use of AI and machine learning for identity security
It also worth noting that his company has had an API security product in its portfolio for over five years, so it not a huge stretch to buy
Elastic Beam.
With this purchase, Ping has not only acquired some advanced technology, it has also acqui-hired a team of AI and machine
learning experts that could help inject the entire Ping product line with AI and machine learning smarts
&Nobody should be surprised who has been watching that Ping will drive machine learning AI and general intelligence into our identity
platform,& Durand said.
Harguindeguy certainly sees the potential here
&I think we can over time bring a high level of monitoring and intelligence to Ping to understand whether an identity may have been used by
someone else or being misused somehow,& he said.
Elastic Beam interface
Photo: Elastic Beam website
Harguindeguy will join Ping Identity as Senior Vice President of Intelligence along with his entire team
Neither company would divulge the exact number of employees, but Durand did acknowledge it fell somewhere between the 11 and 50 mentioned in
the company Crunchbase profile
The original team consisted of around 10 according to Harguindeguy and they have been hiring for some time, so fair to say more than 11, but
less than 50.
Harguindeguy says they were pursued by more than one company (although he wouldn&t say who those other companies were), but he
felt that Ping provided a good cultural match for his company and could take them where they wanted to go faster than they could on their
own, even with Series A money.
&We realized this is going to be really big
How do we go after the market really strongly really fast We saw that we could could fuse this really fast with Ping and have strong go- to
market with with them,& he said.
Durand acknowledged that Ping, which was itself acquired by Vista Equity Partners for $600 million two
years ago, couldn&t have made such an acquisition without the backing of a larger firm like this
&There was there was no chance we could have done either UnboundID (which the company acquired in August 2016) or Elastic Beam on our own
This was purely an artifact of being part of the Vista family portfolio,& he said.
PingIntelligence for APIs, the product based on Elastic
Beam technology, is currently in private preview
It should be generally available some time later this year.
