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Okta<\/a>, the $1.2 billion<\/a> identity management startup for enterprises that some<\/a> tip for an IPO this year<\/a>, has made an acquisition of sorts\u00a0to expand one of its newer lines of business: managing IDs across APIs and apps. Today the San Francisco-based company announced\u00a0that it has picked up the team from\u00a0Stormpath<\/a>, an early mover in providing a way for developers to implement authentication, authorization and user management\u00a0into web and mobile apps by way of an API and a few lines of code. On top of this, the company has acquired a license to use Stormpath\u2019s technology. Financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed.<\/p>\n Notably, this is not a full acquisition: Okta\u2019s co-founder and COO\u00a0Frederic Kerrest, who answered questions about the transaction\u00a0over email,\u00a0did not specify\u00a0who would retain ownership of the technology. We have followed up with him, CEO Todd McKinnon and an Okta spokesperson to see if we can get more detail.<\/p>\n The hiring\u00a0portion covers\u00a035 of Stormpath\u2019s current 45 employees, including co-founders\u00a0Alex Salazar and Les Hazlewood. And with it, Stormpath has announced<\/a> that it will shut down its current API and corresponding SDKs on August 17, 2017, along with a more detailed migration path<\/a> for existing customers.<\/p>\n The deal\u00a0comes relatively quickly on the heels of Okta launching a similar, competing product of its own back in August 2016<\/a>. Bringing in Stormpath\u2019s team and technology is a sign of two things.<\/p>\n First, there is a demand for the service and to develop it further and\u00a0Okta would like capitalise on that in its bid to compete more comprehensively against\u00a0others like Microsoft and Ping Identity.<\/p>\n \u201cOur vision for the Okta Identity Cloud is to become the authentication layer for every app, service, device and person, giving developers a better and more secure way to manage user access to whatever they are building,\u201d said McKinnon in a statement. \u201cThe Stormpath team brings great technical talent and a deep understanding of developer needs, both of which are necessary to provide a world-class developer experience.\u201d<\/p>\n Second, Okta is looking to do this quickly, rather than continue to build out a competing product organically.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve built almost the same stack, which is validating for both companies, but would be duplicative of us to integrate,\u201d Kerrest said. \u201cInstead, the teams will move fast to reach feature parity between the two, and then innovate beyond that.\u201d<\/p>\n Stormpath was founded in San Mateo in 2011 and raised just under $25 million<\/a> in funding from investors that included NEA, Scale Venture Partners, Flybridge and Pelion. The company had\u00a0picked up over 2,500 customers and developer users, and Kerrest tells me that the plan is to transition them over time to Okta.<\/p>\n \u201cThe teams are currently building tools and offering migration support,\u201d Kerrest\u00a0said. There were already some crossover customers, he added, including Vivint Solar and Datastax. Okta\u2019s customers, meanwhile, include Adobe, Pitney Bowes, Experian and Rotary International.<\/p>\n \u201cOkta and Stormpath share a similar culture and desire to build products that will help our customers transform their businesses,\u201d said Salazar. \u201cOur team is excited to join Okta and accelerate efforts to help companies better manage identity across a wide spectrum of applications and services as they grow and scale their businesses.\u201d<\/p>\n Okta has traditionally sold its legacy services into the IT department and more specifically the CIO\u2019s office, who integrate the service on a custom basis on top of the apps that are used in the businesses. To date, Okta touts a decent\u00a0amount of ubiquity in the enterprise world, with integrations with more than 5,000 apps and thousands of customers and a business bolstered by a significant shift to the cloud for enterprise software that requires secure log-ins to use, as well as a rising tide of malicious hacks that have driven companies to have better control over their identity management policies.<\/p>\n This shift into API services and the subsequent\u00a0subsuming of Stormpath\u2019s tech and team speaks to how the company is looking to grow\u00a0its identity management business, expanding its\u00a0customer scope by targeting a larger\u00a0pool of users, developers.<\/p>\n \u201cDevelopers are becoming major buying centers and decision makers within organizations, and with no signs of that trend slowing, the need for secure application integration is growing,\u201d Kerrest said. \u201cWe\u2019ve seen this first-hand from our customers \u2014 and that\u2019s what is driving us to build and scale the product, and the team supporting it, more quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n While Okta is not commenting on its IPO plans at all \u2014 \u201cNo comment, but nice try!\u201d was the response we got when we asked the other day \u2014 we\u2019ve heard from sources, and it appears that others have<\/a> as well, that it has been quietly laying the ground work for a public listing.<\/p>\n This is something that Okta\u00a0essentially projected that it would do when it last raised funding,in September 2015<\/a>.<\/p>\n Cultivating a line of\u00a0business in APIs and working with developers gives the company a way to diversify its revenue stream, as well as grow it.<\/p>\n In that vein, other areas of its business that Okta is growing include its relationship with large cloud providers to provide the identification layer for their services.<\/p>\n