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Okta to Acquire Auth0 for $6.5B

cnbc.com

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Re: Okta to Acquire Auth0 for $6.5B

#151
post #6

Wow. These guys were basically 1 and 2 when it comes to enterprise auth/CIAM. It's great news for the businesses, but will likely only decrease competition in the marketplace. There's a ton of second tier competitors out there with plausible offerings who are probably going to start consolidating to stay alive.

Ping and Sailfish are big companies too.

Re: Okta to Acquire Auth0 for $6.5B

#152

$6,500,000,000.00 for a company providing authentication APIs? Am I the only person left on earth that hasn't lost his mind?

I'm in the same boat and I use okta for work and have no clue what the hell it does or why this just can't be accomplished using open source.

Whilst there certainly are great OSS solutions most big-ish corps already have Active Directory. You can setup ADFS to do SAML for SSO or you can use Azure AD which already has all that out of the box.

If you aren't a big-ish corp then yeah, there are tons of OSS ways of doing IdP that fit your specific tastes etc.

Re: Okta to Acquire Auth0 for $6.5B

#153
post #50

I hope this gives rise to another, smaller viable party outside of Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Perhaps I'm jaded, perhaps hopelessly biased - but I can only see this as a net negative. Okta's open source packages receive a pitiful amount of attention (for example: https://github.com/okta/okta-oidc-js/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%... ) with forks almost becoming a requirement. Auth0 by contrast has been "on the ball" for…

Agreed, I found it hard to write integrations with Okta and ended up using Keycloak and integrating it as an OIDC client. I found Keycloak extremely easy to setup and work with.

Keycloak is fantastic. You want 2FA? Password expiry? SSO? Keycloak does it all. I can't imagine starting any product now without considering Keycloak.

Re: Okta to Acquire Auth0 for $6.5B

#154
> Okta, whose cloud software allows office workers to access all of their apps through a secure online service, said on Wednesday that it’s spending $6.5 billion to acquire rival Auth0. Okta’s shares plunged about 13% in extended trading after the announcement.

Huh? Generally speaking, companies acquire other companies to become more valuable, not for their shares to go down. And even more so when the acquired company is a competitor.

Why do investors think this is such a backwards idea, and why did the board approve an acquisition that investors appear to be rejecting?

This is extremely unusual and the article provides zero explanation whatsoever.

Re: Okta to Acquire Auth0 for $6.5B

#155
post #10

Does this rise to the level of antitrust scrutiny? Aren't these like the two biggest SSO providers?

I'd think so, but in the US antitrust isn't really much of a thing. I wonder if they have grown large enough in Europe yet...

Re: Okta to Acquire Auth0 for $6.5B

#156

> Okta, whose cloud software allows office workers to access all of their apps through a secure online service, said on Wednesday that it’s spending $6.5 billion to acquire rival Auth0. Okta’s shares plunged about 13% in extended trading after the announcement. Huh? Generally speaking, companies acquire other companies to become more valuable, not for their shares to go down . And even more so when the acquired compa…

The default explanation for the share price going down is that the market thinks they're paying too much. And let's face it, $6.5B is pretty toothy. (Remember when FB paid $1B for Instagram and everybody lost their minds?)

But apparently Okta is also going to issue 21% new shares, diluting existing shareholders, so going down only 12% means they're actually kinda-sorta up 9%.

Re: Okta to Acquire Auth0 for $6.5B

#157

$6,500,000,000.00 for a company providing authentication APIs? Am I the only person left on earth that hasn't lost his mind?

That sounds crazy to me too. By comparison, Microsoft paid $7.5B for Github and Google paid $2.6B for Looker.

Idaptive, another IdP (I don't know how it compares in terms of features or client base) was bought by Cyberark for a mere $70M.

Re: Okta to Acquire Auth0 for $6.5B

#158

> Okta, whose cloud software allows office workers to access all of their apps through a secure online service, said on Wednesday that it’s spending $6.5 billion to acquire rival Auth0. Okta’s shares plunged about 13% in extended trading after the announcement. Huh? Generally speaking, companies acquire other companies to become more valuable, not for their shares to go down . And even more so when the acquired compa…

The shares of the purchasing company always go down as the free cash available is being spent - or debt being taken on - on something at a premium.

More explanation here:

https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/203.asp

Re: Okta to Acquire Auth0 for $6.5B

#159
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh, I'm pretty sure it's present by default (not behind a flag) in current versions of Keycloak - would have liked to use it but our setup is so heavily firewalled tokens wouldn't make it over ;)

I'm going to check it out again today because last eval I did with this requirement was ~10 months ago

Yeah there’s a tab for it in the latest docker images, although I’ve never configured it
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