The Covid-19 pandemic, has had far reaching impacts on global economic performance. Economic output in many countries is down, with many heading towards Q3 recessions. The main stock markets in the US and UK have seen significant downward trends over the last 6-8 weeks:
But what impact, has Covid-19 had on public identity, authentication and authorization providers? Have they been impacted more and less than the market average? The huge rise in on line interactions, working for home and the general social distance impact, has seen massive demand for digital services, all of which require security and privacy controls for their effective use. Has that translated to market capitalisation changes?
Ping Identity
Ping is a long time provider of identity and access management software. Their most recent SEC filing is analysed here.
Key Facts
- Founded: 2002
- Funding: $128 Million
- Went Public: Sept 2019
- Employees: ~1000
- HQ: Denver, USA
- Sector: Employee and Consumer Identity
Source: Crunchbase and LinkedIn
A high level comparison of Ping against the DJIA, shows they have effectively tracked the market, with a faster recovery starting at the beginning of April. They are currently trading down ~6% against their price 90 days ago, whilst the DJIA is down ~18%.
Okta
Okta is a long time SaaS provider of cloud based signal sign on services. Their most recent SEC filing is analysed here.
Key Facts
- Founded: 2009
- Funding: $229 Million
- Went Public: April 2017
- Employees: ~2817
- HQ: San Francisco Bay Area, USA
- Sector: Employee Identity and SSO
Source: Crunchbase and LinkedIn
A high level comparison of Okta against the DJIA, shows they have been significantly less impacted, with a lower dip and faster recovery starting at the beginning of March. They are currently trading up ~19.5% against their price 90 days ago, whilst the DJIA is down ~18%. A clear indicator perhaps of the work from home mandate many organisations have faced, requiring employee SSO services more than previously.
Cisco
Cisco is a long time network hardware provider. They have, in recent years however, branched out into the employee authentication space, with their 2018, $2.4 Billion acquisition of Duo Security. They are also a big promoter of zero trust architecture.
Key Facts
- Founded: 1984
- Funding: $2.5 Million
- Went Public: Feb 1990
- Employees: ~91,000
- HQ: San Francisco Bay Area, USA
- Sector: Network hardware and extended services
Source: Crunchbase and LinkedIn
A high level comparison of Cisco against the DJIA, shows they effectively tracked the same path, with a marginally lower dip with recovery matching the general market. Cisco is only marginally beating the market current (down ~13.5% against the market negative ~18%). Perhaps typical of a large and relatively mature public entity, irregardless of the services they provider.
Akamai
Akamai is a “leading provider of cloud services for helping enterprises provide secure, high-performing user experiences on any device”. They have made over 20 acquisitions, including the January 2019 purchase of consumer identity and access manager vendor Janrain. In 2019 they also purchased Krypt.io, a provider of mobile authentication technology.
Key Facts
- Founded: 1998
- Went Public: Oct 1999
- Employees: ~7,300
- HQ: Greater Boston Area, USA
- Sector: Network hardware and extended services
Source: Crunchbase and LinkedIn
Akamai is currently, not only beating the market, but also ~3% up on it share price from pre-Covid-19, 90 days ago. Akamai’s broad acquisition structure seems geared towards network and end user security from a range of different use cases and that seems to be benefiting them from things like the increased work from home initiatives. Their initial dip in March, was much shallower than that of Cisco and the market and they have been showing rough positive growth since April.
Images sourced from google.com/finance