Here’s a de-acquisition story just to mix things up: the United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority has ordered Meta, owner of Facebook, to reverse last year’s purchase of animated GIF distributor Giphy.  The Authority felt the deal reduced potential competition for ad sales and could let Facebook/Meta reduce other competitors’ access to Giphy GIFs or demand more data from them.  It’s one more sign that regulators everywhere are turning on Meta/Facebook after years of neglect.

Digital experience platform Optimizely is further expanding its scope with a deal to buy Welcome, which provides content management, digital asset management, and marketing resource management.  You may recall that Optimizely itself was purchased in September 2020 by Episerver, which then adopted the Optimizely name.  And who could forget that they bought the Zaius CDP in March 2021?

CIAM (Customer Identity and Access Management) was once largely about managing employee access to company systems, but it’s increasingly applied to consumer log-ins and identities as well.  This creates an overlap with the identity management systems more traditionally used for customer data.  The expanded market helps to explain why private investor Thoma Bravo just paid $2.8 billion for CIAM vendor Ping Identity, a 60% premium of its most recent stock price and just under 10x revenue.