The report examines 12 CIAM vendors and ranks them in four categories: Overall Leadership, Product Leadership, Market Leadership, and Innovation Leadership.

Gigya is the only company named an Overall Leader, and is the only company to be named a Leader in all four categories.

“Consumer Identity and Access Management is (a category that) has emerged in the last few years to meet evolving business requirements,’’ says the report, written by KuppingerCole analyst John Tolbert.

“Many organizations are feeling and responding to the pressure to provide a better customer experience and return more on the investment in their online presences and user databases. To do so, they must capture more identity data from customers, with their outright consent, and then transform it into meaningful information to increase customer satisfaction and, ultimately, improve their bottom lines.”

Regarding Gigya, the reports says, “In the market for CIAM (we find) Gigya is the dominant player with the strongest offerings.”

KuppingerCole, headquartered in Wiesbaden, Germany, is an international and independent analyst organization that offers neutral advice, expertise, thought leadership and practical relevance in information security, identity and access management, risk management and compliance, and governance, as well as digital transformation.

“The CIAM market is emerging and there are now vendors with mature products that are capable of managing many millions of identities and processing potentially billions of logins and transactions per day,” said Martin Kuppinger, Founder and Principal Analyst of KuppingerCole. “Gigya’s focus on consumer experience and integrating identity into marketing tools provides a powerful platform for not only managing customer identities, but also for creating usable intelligence to better serve those customers – making them an overall leader in CIAM.”

Patrick Salyer, chief executive officer of Gigya, said: “We are honored to be recognized as the leader in CIAM by KuppingerCole, given their deep expertise in managing and protecting identities. KuppingerCole’s report makes a compelling case for CIAM as a powerful tool for building trusted relationships that transform unknown online users into known customers. That is our mission at Gigya: To help our clients around the world connect with consumers across the web, mobile devices and the Internet of Things; collect relevant privacy compliant profile information; and convert that data into a personalized customer experience.”