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Making sense of the Ping Identity & ForgeRock CIAM roadmap

Ping Identity’s acquisition of ForgeRock changed the CIAM vendor landscape overnight. This report provides insights into what that might mean for both new and existing customers.

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About this report

Ping Identity’s acquisition of ForgeRock – brokered by private equity firm Thoma Bravo – changed the customer identity and access management (CIAM) vendor landscape overnight. This report provides insights into what that might mean for both new and existing customers.

A quick history of how ForgeRock became Ping

Where once there were two CIAM competitors, now there’s one. But it took a while to get there.

To get some perspective, let’s go back to October 2022. Private equity firm Thoma Bravo, which already owned identity vendor SailPoint, was finalizing its $2.8 billion acquisition of Ping Identity. Then, they surprised pretty much everyone by making another big announcement. Thoma Bravo was also buying Ping’s arch rival, ForgeRock, for $2.2 billion. They planned to take the publicly traded company private.

“Not so fast!” said the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), which effectively paused Thoma Bravo’s acquisition of ForgeRock. The DOJ proceeded to spend 10 months investigating whether Thoma Bravo’s acquisition of two competitors would be detrimental for customers. In the meantime, Ping Identity and ForgeRock customers and employees wondered: “will they or won’t they?” More specifically, would Thoma Bravo keep Ping and ForgeRock as separate entities or would they mash ‘em together. Or perhaps do a triple-mash-up with SailPoint.

By October 2023, the long “Will they or won’t they” wait was over for CIAM customers of Ping Identity and ForgeRock.

Verdict: mashup it is.

And then, customers had one fewer CIAM choice.

With a nearly duplicative product portfolio (and little customer overlap) between these two competitors, it has naturally led to a lot of questions from current and prospective CIAM customers. Chief among those is which product could get killed? Or, put another way, will the Ping or ForgeRock CIAM customer base be force-migrated into a new product? It’s a doozie.

Of course, when a deal like this is announced everyone talks publicly about all the great new tech and capabilities that have come together. But the biggest challenge is often people. Post merger you’ve got two of everything: VPs of Product, VPs of Customer Success, Directors of Engineering? On each side you’ve got leaders that are emotionally invested in their products and customers. But someone has to make some hard calls because typically there are only so many R&D dollars togo around (remember, this is funded by private equity, not a growth-oriented VC firm).

For the products that don’t make it, even harder decisions await. How do you do the right thing for the existing customer? Do you provide a migration or upgrade path? Offer a replacement? Or – worst case – put the product in maintenance mode and slap an end of life date on it?

For the customer, none of the choices are ideal.

So what do we know so far about how Ping Identity is approaching these decisions?

Ping Identity’s CIAM strategy: 5 key takeaways

To their credit, Ping Identity has been pretty transparent about their CIAM strategy. In fact they released this 10-minute video where their Chief Product Officer reviewed their go-forward vision and strategy for bringing together the overlapping product suites they now own as a result of their acquisition of ForgeRock. You’ll get a glimpse of their detailed product roadmap at 9:26 in the video.

If you have questions, though, we suspect you’re not alone. The video states that Ping will “be supporting both platforms indefinitely into the future.” That sounds great. But when you dig deeper there’s lots and lots of talk about migration and integration through 2025. What we don’t see as much talk about is innovation, particularly when it comes to CIAM.

We like to think of ourselves as being customer obsessed – no matter whose customers they are.
In that spirit, here are our takeaways from the Ping roadmap presentation.

1. Ping won.

When the merger was announced, we pondered whether Ping or ForgeRock would be the CIAM platform of choice. Now we know. For virtually all of the major decisions that were up in the air Ping chose ... wait for it ... Ping’s products. It’s not surprising given that Thoma Bravo, the PE firm that acquired both Ping and ForgeRock, appointed Ping CEO, Andre Durand, to lead the new company.