Gigya

» see gigya.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Gigya sold the part of a website nobody looked at. If a news site or a retailer let you sign in with an account you already had somewhere else, the row of buttons was often a script loaded from gigya.com, and the profile behind it sat in a database belonging to a company founded in Tel Aviv in 2006 and run out of Mountain View, California.

It did not start as an identity company. The first product was a tool for distributing widgets, built in the years when widgets looked like the shape of the web, and the pivot to logins came after. By 2017 the company said it managed 1.3 billion customer identities for more than 700 enterprise customers, with about 280 staff and 104 million dollars raised from Intel Capital and Benchmark among others. The customers were the kind of brand that puts a wall in front of its content, like Forbes or the NBA.

Nobody ever signed up for Gigya, which was precisely the arrangement. The publisher bought the identity layer, the reader pressed a button with somebody else's logo on it, and the vendor's name showed up only in a script tag buried in the page source. I spent those years looking at a lot of pages like that and could not have told you who made the buttons.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what the button did ~

Social login was sold to publishers as a fix for one number: the share of readers who open a registration form and leave. Pressing a button you had already pressed elsewhere was faster than inventing another password, and the site got a verified email address plus whatever the source network was willing to hand over.

The rest of the product was the unglamorous half. Gigya held the profile and the consent records, which turned out to matter enormously as European data law tightened through 2016 and 2017. The login widget was the visible part. The dated record of what each reader had agreed to was the part the buyer talked about.

~ the stolen domain ~

In late November 2014 the Syrian Electronic Army took gigya.com by changing its DNS configuration at the registrar, outside Gigya's own systems entirely. Because so many newsrooms loaded their login widget from that one domain, visitors to dozens of Western news sites got a pop-up from the attackers instead. Patrick Salyer, the chief executive, posted a note the same day headed "Regarding Today's Service Attack" saying no data had been compromised and the issue was resolved.

No data was taken, and the company was arguably the victim of its registrar rather than of its own engineering. It was still the clearest demonstration anyone had given that a few hundred major websites were quietly depending on a company their readers had never heard of, and that the weak point was a domain record.

~ swallowed by a product list ~

SAP confirmed the purchase on 24 September 2017. The price was never disclosed by either side, and the Israeli business press reported it at around 350 million dollars in cash. The stated logic was consent and profile data feeding the rest of SAP's customer software.

The name died on a stage in Orlando. On 5 June 2018 SAP announced C/4HANA, and the press release listed the components: "SAP Customer Data Cloud (including the acquired Gigya solutions)". Twelve years of work appear there as a parenthesis. The product kept running under the new label and most of the customers never noticed, because nothing visible on their own sites changed.

gigya.com no longer resolves. What answers instead is a page on sap.com, filed under a section called acquired brands, titled "What is Gigya?" and written to explain to anyone still searching for the old name where their vendor went. Being memorialized by your buyer's marketing department is one of the quieter ways for a brand to end.

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