Connect. Collect. Convert.
These three words succinctly explain what Gigya brings to the table for some of the largest consumer-facing companies in the world, explained CEO Patrick Salyer in an interview with me earlier this week at TMC (News - Alert) Editor’s Day Silicon Valley.
Industry giants such as Fox, KLM, Red Bull, and Turner rely on Gigya’s solution to register their website visitors, collect data from their own sites and from outside sources such as social media on these visitors so they can build rich customer profiles, and help these businesses draw insights on that data in an effort to convert website visits into sales.
Gigya plays in the product category known as identity and access management, Salyer said. But rather than providing that for new employees, as such solutions are typically used, he said, Gigya leverages it to help businesses better understand and serve prospects and customers.
Identity is becoming critical to every single business because it’s the starting point for the customer journey, said Salyer of Gigya, whose solutions are typically sold to VPs of marketing or CTOs. That means businesses need to think about that strategically, as they would with any key infrastructure, he added.
He also talked about Identity 3.0, which he said will do away with the problem of forgetting passwords and move us to passwordless authentication based on biometrics using people’s fingerprints or voice.
One of the recent developments that has created a lot of interest and debate for businesses in the age of big data was the October ruling in which the Court of Justice of the European Union said the Safe Harbor framework is invalid. That means businesses that manage consumer data around the world need to think about regionalized data rules, Salyer said. And that, he said, makes it more complex for businesses to handle this on their own.
Founded in 2007, Gigya has a more than 325 employees, seven offices worldwide, is deployed across 46 countries, and reaches 1.5 billion users each month. The company has raised more than $100 million in venture funding from Benchmark Capital, Intel Capital (News - Alert), and Mayfield, among others.