I like this article about the acquisition (disclosure, I know the author).

https://strategyofsecurity.com/p/the-case-for-and-against-pa...

From the article:

> If Palo Alto Networks was going to do identity, they had to do it big.

> Commercially, there was no way they were going to build a successful identity business if they had just picked up a bunch of small companies and tried to put them together. They needed to bootstrap their entry into the market, so a scaled acquisition made sense.

> The identity market is at a completely different level of maturity compared to the situation when Palo Alto Networks built its cloud security business by stitching together smaller companies. That approach worked because the cloud security market was still forming. There essentially was no market leader to acquire.

> Identity has been through multiple generations of market leaders (Sun, IBM, CA, Oracle, and others. The market has already gone through multiple phases of disruption and M&A. For the most part, we've seen it all.

> Currently, we've landed with a handful of specialist identity players — some public, some owned by private equity firms. You know them: CyberArk, Okta, SailPoint, and Ping Identity. And then there's Microsoft. We'll get to that.

> Palo Alto Networks had zero chance of competing with those four companies (plus Microsoft and the other incumbents who still hold material market share) by building, buying, and partnering their way to a coherent identity offering.

> If there was one market where a massive deal had to be done, identity had to be it.

My read of that is basically they are buying a fast growing, big player in workforce identity that they can integrate in with their next generation security platform.