SailPoint To Buy SaaS Application Management Startup Intello

Buying early-stage vendor Intello will help SailPoint customers discover, manage and secure SaaS applications that are currently outside the IT organization’s purview, the company says.

SailPoint has agreed to purchase early-stage vendor Intello to extend the right security controls to ungoverned SaaS applications that lie hidden across an organization’s environment.

The Austin, Texas-based identity security vendor said its proposed acquisition of New York-based Intello will help customers discover, manage and secure SaaS applications that are currently outside the IT organization’s purview. The deal will address the current lack of visibility into what SaaS applications exist across a business as well as help properly manage and secure access to those apps for all workers.

“With the rapid adoption and use of cloud technologies in the past year, we want to make it incredibly easy for customers to get their arms around the risk of SaaS app sprawl,” SailPoint Executive Vice President of Product Grady Summers said in a statement. “Discovery combined with visibility are the name of the game here, and we’ll be able to deliver that to our customers with Intello.”

[Related: SailPoint Buys Two Cloud Security Startups For $37.5 Million]

Terms of the proposed Intello acquisition were not disclosed. SailPoint’s stock remains unchanged at $62.08 per share in after-hours trading Thursday.

Intello was founding in 2017, employs 30 people, and has raised $5.8 million in three rounds of outside funding, according to LinkedIn and Crunchbase. Intello was co-founded and led by Barak Kaufman, who was previously an investor Insight Partners. Kaufman isn’t mentioned in the acquisition press release, and SailPoint didn’t immediately respond to questions about whether he’ll be joining the company.

“With our deep identity security knowledge and expertise combined with Intello’s expertise in SaaS app management, we believe this acquisition will allow SailPoint to fully secure and support this future world of work – enabling secure SaaS adoption at scale with identity security,” Summers said in the statement.

Buying Intello will provide SailPoint customers with greater visibility and control over what data ungoverned SaaS apps are accessing, what information they may be importing, and whether or not they are configured properly, SailPoint said. Fusing Intello’s detailed usage data and analytics with SailPoint’s artificial intelligence will help customers secure their SaaS applications and improve compliance.

As a result of this acquisition, SailPoint’s Identity Platform will be able to ensure that every newly-discovered SaaS app – as well as the data within – is protected with the right identity security controls. The increased purchasing and self-provisioning of unsanctioned SaaS apps in recent years has led to a sharp rise in unprotected data being stored and shared within these apps, according to Summers.

“With little to no visibility into what shadow access exists within their organization, IT teams are further challenged to protect from the cyber risks that have increased over the past year,” Summers said.

Intello’s customers include Peloton, StackPath, Workiva and Flatiron, according to the company’s website. The product integrates with other security vendors such as Okta, OneLogin and Sumo Login, communications platforms such as Zoom and Slack, and technology tools like Salesforce, Box and Microsoft’s Office 365, the company’s website stated.

This is SailPoint’s first acquisition October 2019, when the company bought emerging vendors Orkus and OverWatchID for $37.5 million to help customers better control access to applications in public cloud environments. Those deals were intended to help SailPoint detect potential anomalies in the cloud, enforce access policies across all users, and maintain compliance across all enterprise infrastructures.

Other than that, the only other acquisition in SailPoint’s 17-year history was its July 2015 purchase of Whitebox Security, which was focused on reducing security risk by identifying where sensitive data resides, according to Crunchbase.