jobs. They need to quickly turn on the access as well as turn it off.”
SailPoint’s customers include “highly IT-centric and highly regulated” companies such as those in the financial services, healthcare, and insurance industries, with 10,000 or more employees, McClain says. Now, SailPoint is targeting firms just below those—ones with about 3,000 workers. The company competes with large, well-known software companies such as Oracle and IBM for those clients.
A few days before the SailPoint announcement, IBM reported that it had acquired identity-management company Lighthouse Security Group. In July, IBM purchased Rome-based CrossIdeas as well.
McClain and Cunningham founded SailPoint in 2005 following the adoption of Sarbanes-Oxley financial regulations as well as heightened awareness of adhering to HIPAA standards in an era of electronic medical records. “Governments have recognized that companies haven’t historically protected this information,” Cunningham says.
A high-profile example of this was in 2008 when a Societe Generale trader incurred nearly $7 billion in losses without authorization to make such bets. SailPoint’s founders say that sort of activity would have been spotted by its software, and well before such losses could be racked up.
SailPoint raised about $21 million in three rounds of equity funding from investors such as Austin Ventures and Silverton Partners, both based in Austin, as well as Lightspeed Venture Partners in Menlo Park, CA. The last round was in 2008, and McClain and Cunningham say the company is profitable.
Over the years, the company grew largely by acquisition of smaller firms, including that of Cloudmasons and Beacon Professional Services, both based in Austin.
More than 300 people now work at SailPoint in offices in Europe, India, Israel, and Singapore as well as in its Austin headquarters. Last year, SailPoint announced it had surpassed $100 million in revenue.
Both men say they are staying in their current roles and don’t expect much change in the company’s day-to-day operations. “Now, we’re talking about a whole different class of acquisitions; we can swallow much bigger fish leveraging the big pockets of Thoma Bravo,” Cunningham says. “We now have an industrial grade harpoon.”
