**Editor’s Note: Please click here for a recap of the biggest channel-impacting merger and acquisition news from August.**

On the heels of its acquisition of Mtel, cloud services provider Evolve IP has acquired Clearlogin, an identity authentication technology provider based in Mountainside, New Jersey.

The purchase is part of Evolve IP’s ongoing development strategy and will provide ID-as-a-service (IDaaS) in the Evolve IP OneCloud platform, new international sales opportunities, and a “significant presence in the rapidly expanding access management market,” the company said.

Evolve IP’s Scott Kinka

Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Scott Kinka, Evolve IP’s chief technology officer, tells Channel Partners that Clearlogin provides two opportunities for partners. First, it gives partners a reason to reach out to clients with a new product that “delivers a solution to a major problem they are all facing; IT resources are spending up to seven hours a week on password resets alone.”

“Second, Clearlogin will drive increased monthly recurring revenue (MRR) on Evolve IP cloud communications and cloud computing opportunities,” he said. “In addition to Clearlogin being included at no charge for Evolve IP cloud solutions, businesses can add over 4,000 cloud applications for a small per-seat fee, to bring together all of the customer’s cloud applications into a single interface (whether or not those solutions are provided by Evolve IP).”

Clearlogin’s service is delivered via a web or mobile portal and includes reporting and analytics, multi-factor authentication, security policy access management, and cross-domain support for enterprises with multiple directory-integration needs.

“We expect that in addition to new identity and access management (IAM) sales and upsells on current solutions, that partners will uncover many new cloud opportunities for both computing and communications,” Kinka said. “The entire Evolve IP OneCloud plaform will be integrated with Clearlogin, opening up opportunities for DRaaS, contact center, UCaaS, DaaS and our other solutions. We should also note that this will also open up opportunities for our partners with international partners.”

Both Evolve IP and Clearlogin have partner programs and channel communities.

“We expect that early in the first quarter of 2018 all partner programs and ecosystems will be unified,” Kinka said.

Evolve IP provides cloud services to more than 1,500 enterprises and to more than 350,000 users in every industry including health care, finance, veterinary, legal, insurance, construction, education, technology, travel and retail.

Intelisys, the master agent and tech services distributor, is an Evolve IP partner.

“Intelisys is at the forefront of bringing clients to the cloud and one challenge we have seen emerging over the last year is cloud sprawl; specifically the proliferation of services that have been deployed without a strategy or plan for security and access management,” said Andrew Pryfogle, Intelisys’ senior vice president of cloud transformation. “This is a very smart move for Evolve IP as it solves … an immediate market need while also opening up new revenue opportunities. We believe that our sales partners should be reaching out to their clients today to understand what pain points they have around identity and access management, and also use that time to uncover cloud opportunities that are emerging in 2018.”