Ping Identity Founder and CEO Andre Durand experienced a career-defining moment — he led the merging of two leading identity security players Ping Identity and ForgeRock within a mere 100 days and picked the leadership team in just 9 days. Durand shared the behind-the-scenes story with SDxCentral in a recent interview.

Private equity firm Thoma Bravo closed the acquisition of Ping Identity in an all-cash deal valued at about $2.8 billion in October 2022. Then in August 2023, the equity firm announced the completion of its about $2.3 billion ForgeRock deal and combined it into Ping Identity.

Durand recounted the speed of the integration, a decision driven by a clear goal to start the new year united as a single company with one leadership team.

The leadership selection was a difficult process, he said, “All the candidates at both companies were fantastic. But the goal was to get a good healthy mix of talent between the two companies.”

Some key ForgeRock executives, including CEO Fran Rosch and CTO Eve Maler, departed the company around the time of the acquisition. ForgeRock Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) Pete Angstadt became the CRO of post-merger Ping Identity.

“When two companies come together and there's clearly some overlap and redundancy. Everyone is a professional so everyone understands there has to be changes,” Durand said. “we have a loyalty to the cause of our customers and to the company. And speed was important that we've not confused the market or confused the company internally as to who the leadership was.”

The company now has about 2,000 employees after the merger, according to Durand. The general and administrative and go-to-market teams are where there is the most overlap and the need for a merger, but no changes to the product and engineer teams, he said.

Service overlap and strategic synergy A potential hurdle in the merger was the service overlap between the two companies, including the core access management, directory and API management offerings. Gartner named both Ping Identity and ForgeRock as leaders in its 2023 Magic Quadrant for Access Management report.

Durand approached this challenge by recognizing the diverse needs of their global customer base. “One size doesn't fit all,” he said, adding Ping Identity maintains a variety of options in its core access management without forcing unnecessary changes from existing customers.

The company plans to build a roadmap and unify a few areas “where for the better of the future customer base,” such as software development kits (SDKs), the agents, edge technology, API gateways, and multifactor authentication (MFA) systems, Durand said.

“There's a unified vision for the future, but it starts from the existing investments that [customers] have already made,” he added.

Ping Identity CEO addresses customer concerns on the merger with ForgeRock With regard to the merger, Mr. Durand noted that customers were primarily concerned about the potential for forced change and a slowdown in innovation.

“The number one concern was: are we going to force them to change when they've already made a decision and significant investments to integrate this technology,” he said. “The second concern is: are you going to stop innovating?”

Durand reassures customers that there will be no forced changes to their current systems. “Our solutions are all mature. They're all profitable solutions. And so it made no sense for us to force one customer to have to give up something that is working for them and force them into something else. So unnecessary migration was not the goal.”

Ping Identity also commits to continue the pace of investment and innovation support.

Durand said, post-merger, customers from both the legacy Ping and ForgeRock sides will have a broader portfolio that includes new capabilities in identity management, governance, verification, decentralized identity in authorization, and risk and fraud signals.

“The advantage to customers is that as Ping [Identity] now becomes a full complete platform provider for both workforce identity and customer identity … customers can get the outcomes faster, they have fewer vendors to deal with,” he said.

“They can achieve the full lifecycle of identity management, access management and governance for both employees and customers, and they can deploy on-prem, they can deploy in their cloud of choice or they can consume as SaaS any or all of those capabilities. That level of flexibility under one roof is very unique,” Durand added.