LogMeIn, a company that provides remote connectivity solutions to businesses and individuals, today is announcing an interesting acquisition that builds out the kinds of services it can offer and taps further into the wider shift to cloud-based services that we are seeing among enterprises and consumers: it has acquired Meldium, a Y-Combinator alum that specialises in single-sign on and other identity management services.
Publicly-traded LogMeIn says it is paying $15 million in the deal for BBA, the name under which Meldium is incorporated. The price includes both a cash payment and a performance and retention-based earn out.
As the name of the startup implies, Meldium effectively “melds” together the sign-on process for a host of different apps, 1,500 in all at present, including popular cloud-based services like Dropbox, Google Apps, Hubspot, WordPress, Zendesk, Salesforce, Asana, Trello, Evernote, JIRA, and Rackspace. One key to its usefulness is in how useful it is for professionals who are not of the technical persuasion. As Colleen wrote when it launched last year,
This is both a technology acquisition and talent acquisition: the Meldium team, including founders Anton Vaynshtok, Bradley Buda, and Boris Jabes, will joining LogMeIn’s San Francisco office.
LogMeIn, which itself is based out of Boston, currently counts some 100,000 small-and-medium business customers, and it has been building out its portfolio of other services that help those businesses manage cloud-based data.
They include join.me for remote meetings; AppGuru, a cloud app discovery and management offering; LogMeIn Central, a remote device management solution; Cubby Enterprise, an enterprise file sync and share solution; and LogMeIn Pro, the popular remote access product. But it has also come under fire for dropping other products, namely its eponymous free service.
It’s not clear yet if LogMeIn intends to retain Meldium’s existing service tiers, which are based on a freemium model. Teams with fewer than five people and 10 apps or less can use it for free; those with up to 20 users and 20 apps pay $29/month; for 100 users and 50 apps the price is $79/month; and it’s $199/month for up to 250 users and unlimited apps.
LogMeIn is currently valued at just over $1 billion.
“Cloud apps and the bring-your-own-app trend – BYOA – have forced IT professionals to rethink how they manage identities, employee access, and data security. SSO is rapidly emerging as an effective means of addressing these security and identity management challenges, and Meldium has created what we believe is one of the most elegant, intuitive SSO solutions on the market today,” said Michael Simon, CEO of LogMeIn.
“We believe the addition ofMeldium and SSO — together with the identity and cloud app management capabilities introduced in AppGuru – will accelerate our ability to address some of today’s most pressing IT challenges, while positioning us favorably to compete in the fastest growing part of the identity management market.”
