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Akamai acquires Janrain to strengthen identity access controls, bot protection

Akamai says the deal will make the firm’s solutions more “identity aware.”
Written by Charlie Osborne, Contributing Writer

Akamai has acquired Janrain in a bid to improve security access controls and identity management.

On Monday, John Summers, Akamai VP & CTO announced the purchase, which is designed to improve Akamai's position in "securing against expanding threats while also enabling superior web experiences."

Financial details were not disclosed.

Janrain focuses on the development of customer identity and access management (CIAM) solutions. Founded in 2002, the company counts Coca-Cola, the BBC, Samsung, and illy among its customers, and also says that the firm was the creator of social login, a single sign-on system which uses data from social networking services to authenticate users.

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Janrain has raised a total of $79.8 million through six funding rounds.

The company is also the developer of the Janrain Identity Cloud, which is destined to merge with the Akamai Intelligent Platform. Akamai says that Janrain's technologies will boost Akamai's security and performance solutions, such as Akamai Edge, and will make them more "identity aware."

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Janrain's technologies will also be merged with the Akamai Bot Manager, which Summers says already protects customer login pages from attack. While Bot manager detects bot activity, it is hoped Janrain's solutions will "result in increased accuracy in mitigating identity fraud -- delivering superior detection with the lowest possible false positive rates," as well as giving Akamai the chance to review login history and access patterns to better understand botnet attacks.

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Janrain's CIAM solutions will be offered as a service to enterprise clients.

"By broadening Akamai's role in delivering the best end user experience possible, extending and improving our security protections, and expanding to marketing initiatives and execution, I believe Akamai with Janrain can become an even more strategic vendor to our customers," says Summer.

The deal is expected to close in early 2019.

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