Janrain to Gigya customers: Come aboard

Janrain is asking Gigya’s customers to jump ship.

The two companies have been key competitors in the space of cloud-based customer identity and access management, or CIAM. But in September, SAP bought Gigya for its marketing and e-commerce platform, raising questions about how the end of Gigya’s status as a standalone provider of customer identity would affect its positioning.

Now, Janrain is picking up on that vulnerability with a new migration program specifically designed for Gigya “customers concerned how the SAP acquisition will affect the functionality, integration, support and other services.” It offers a complimentary standard migration package and cost savings in first-year annual recurring fees.

“We’ve been the two [main CIAM players] in the cloud space for some time,” Janrain CEO Jim Kaskade told me.

Now, he said, the acquisition means that “Gigya is absolutely no longer an independent broker, and it will look how to take advantage of the synergy” with the SAP platform.

One issue could be whether SAP’s clients get preferential access to Gigya’s identity data, plus Kaskade also pointed out potential integration issues.

Gigya will now be integrated, he said, with SAP analytics and other parts of the platform.

“For SAP shops,” Kaskade said, “it’s great.”

“But what about a client that’s all blue, all IBM?” He added that Gigya has more incentives to focus on SAP than on other integrations.

I asked Kaskade if Janrain was prepared to make a commitment that it wouldn’t accept a similar acquisition offer.

“Basically, the answer is yes,” he said, “with [one] caveat.”

The caveat: the company is “building for a public offering, not an acquisition.”

About The Author

Barry Levine

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.