Thoma Bravo completes ForgeRock acquisition, merges into Ping Identity

What happened

Private equity firm Thoma Bravo closed its $2.3B acquisition of ForgeRock on August 23, 2023, and immediately announced the company would be combined with Ping Identity, which Thoma Bravo had taken private in October 2022 for $2.8B. The unified entity operates under the Ping Identity brand. Through 2024 and 2025, ForgeRock's product line has been progressively integrated into Ping's, with the ForgeRock branding being phased out.

Why it matters

The merger consolidated two of the four major enterprise-tier identity platforms into one Thoma Bravo portfolio company. Combined with the Akamai Identity Cloud sunset and Oracle's IDCS-to-Identity-Domains rationalization, the enterprise heritage CIAM tier has compressed materially since 2023. What was a four-vendor enterprise market (ForgeRock, Ping, Oracle, IBM, plus Akamai for B2C) is now effectively a two-vendor heritage tier (Ping + IBM Verify, plus SAP CDC for B2C).

For customers, the consolidation is mostly good news on paper, fewer vendors to evaluate, more focused product investment, but the integration period creates real risk. Product-line decisions that affect ForgeRock customers' migration paths have been ongoing through 2024-2025; not every ForgeRock feature survives the merge with Ping's product roadmap.

Deepak's take

PE consolidation of enterprise identity has been the dominant 2023-2025 narrative, and the Thoma Bravo / ForgeRock+Ping arc is the headline. The pattern repeats in adjacent categories: Vista with Duo years earlier, OpenText with several IAM acquisitions, K1 with various security tools. The thesis is sound, heritage identity has stable revenue, strong customer lock-in, and modernization upside, but the customer experience during integration is rarely what the press release implies.

For ForgeRock customers, the realistic 2026 question is whether to ride out the integration or evaluate alternatives now. Customers on AM (Access Management) have a smoother forward path; customers on IDM (Identity Management) and DS (Directory Services) face more uncertainty. The Ping product family covers most of the same ground, but custom configurations rarely port cleanly. For greenfield enterprise CIAM evaluation in 2026, Ping under Thoma Bravo remains a credible enterprise heritage choice, but most teams are better served by evaluating the modern developer-first tier alongside it.

What to do

• Existing ForgeRock customers: Engage with Ping account management on the integration roadmap for your specific deployment (AM vs IDM vs DS). Get the migration timeline in writing.
• Greenfield enterprise CIAM evaluation: Include Ping (the merged entity) on the shortlist for traditional enterprise IAM use cases. For B2C consumer-facing CIAM at enterprise scale, also evaluate SAP Customer Data Cloud and the modern developer tier (Auth0, Stytch / Twilio, Clerk, MojoAuth).
• B2B SaaS evaluation: Ping's B2B story is improving but still trails the modern B2B specialists (Frontegg, WorkOS). See the B2B SaaS identity guide for the segment shortlist.

For broader market context, see the CIAM vs IAM vs IDaaS guide and the build-vs-buy framework.