Okta has acquired Stormpath, a company that provides authentication services for developers. The deal should help the identity provider improve its developer-facing capabilities.
Stormpath offered developers a set of tools for managing user logins for their apps. Rather than building a login system from scratch, developers could call the Stormpath API and have the company take care of it for them. Frederic Kerrest, Okta’s co-founder and Chief Operating Officer, said that the acquisition should help his company build self-service capabilities for developers.
While Okta is probably best known for its identity and access management products aimed at businesses’ internal use, the company also operates a developer platform aimed at helping app developers handle user identity. Kerrest said that the developer capabilities are a fast-growing part of Okta’s business, but that its functionality could use some help. That’s where this acquisition comes in.
“We do well obviously [selling] at the executive level, but we think that there are ways we can do better working bottom-up with developers and better serve their needs,” Kerrest said.
The Stormpath team, including co-founders Alex Salazar and Les Hazlewood, will be joining Okta as a result. They’ll be working on improving Okta’s developer platform capabilities.
Okta will eventually shut down Stormpath’s service as a result of the deal. Kerrest said that his company is working on building tools to migrate customers from one service to the other.
One of the benefits of the acquisition is that Okta and Stormpath have some shared customers, and those businesses should be able to use one company’s services for their identity needs when all is said and done.