American digital infrastructure company, Equinix, has announced that it is acquiring MainOne, a West African data centre and connectivity solutions provider with a presence in Nigeria, Ghana and the Ivory Coast at the rate of $320 million (N131.6 billion).
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Kenyan retail-tech startup MarketForce is expanding into five further markets and targeting one million merchants after securing a partnership with fintech company Cellulant. Co-founded in 2018 by Tesh Mbaabu and Mesongo Sibuti, MarketForce is a B2B retail marketplace that empowers informal merchants in Africa to source, order and pay for inventory digitally and conveniently, access financing, collect digital payments and make extra money by reselling digital financial services such as airtime, electricity tokens and bill payments.
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.