ForgeRock Simplifies Identity Access Management

A recent report by ReportsnReports.com projects the Global Identity and Access Management market to grow 12.90% annually over the period 2014 through 2019 driven by increased adoption of these services by the BFSI segment. An older IDC report pegs the market at $4.8 billion in 2013, and projected it to grow to $6.9 billion by the year 2017. The industry has seen a movement away from the traditional on-premise identity and access management solutions, such as those provided by Oracle and CA, to the newer Cloud based and scalable platforms. San Francisco-based ForgeRock is successfully catering to this market.

ForgeRock’s Offerings

ForgeRock was founded in 2010 by Sun alumni, Lasse Andresen, Victor Ake, Jonathan Scudder, and Steve Ferris. The company was initially set up in Norway and was founded after the sale of Sun to Oracle. The founders realized the need for an open source stack based on OpenSSO that would provide a transition path for Sun customers who were not entirely in agreement with Oracle’s growth plans. ForgeRock wanted to offer these customers a technology that was not based on aging proprietary platforms that Oracle wanted to support.

ForgeRock is built on Sun Microsystems’ open source identity projects. ForgeRock realized that traditional solutions were not built to address the massive growth of users, applications and devices and did not, thus anticipate the relationships between them. ForgeRock thus pioneered the open, unified, scalable identity relationship management platform that would be able to deliver customer-facing solutions to any device on premise or in the cloud.

Today, ForgeRock is transforming businesses by connecting customer identities with the digital world, thus improving customer engagement. They are helping build seamless connected relationships across applications, devices, and other digitally connected devices. They create identity relationship management solutions for the web including public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, and enterprise and mobile environments. Their products include a full suite of identity management solutions that include authorisation, authentication, risk management, and policy control. Through their solutions, customers for insurance companies can access and manage all their policies at a single place. Similarly, Norwegian citizens can access services offered by more than 300 government agencies from a single portal.

ForgeRock’s Financials

ForgeRock operates on the commercial open source model with value added services such as support, services, and training to generate revenues. They do not disclose their financials, but have seen massive growth in the recent past. They have more than 500 million end users in more than 30 countries. Revenues grew by 305% in 2013 and they claim to have had a record 2014 fiscal. Their customers include Toyota, Reuters, Salesforce.com, TriNet, and the Norwegian government.

They have been venture funded so far with $52 million in investments from Foundation Capital, Accel Partners, and Meritech Capital Partners. The last round of funding was held in June 2014 when they raised $30 million at an undisclosed valuation. They did mention that valuation had increased ten times compared to the valuation in the $15 million round held in April 2013.