Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Daniel Raskin, VP of Strategy at ForgeRock (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I’m not convinced about what you’re saying. The horizontal stuff is commodity, but the real differentiation of what the user experience can be for an automobile that is IoT-enabled is where the interesting opportunity is.

Daniel Raskin: It’s going to be companies like Toyota or others like that who are building those next generation platforms using the software platform of the future.

Sramana Mitra: You can say that but the automobile players suck at designing software and user experience.

Daniel Raskin: I can only judge from the experience of what I see at ForgeRock. There may be other conversations you have where you see that happening. We’re very engaged with the analysts on who the players are and who’s part of the conversation and who’re the thought leaders in terms of building out these use cases. It’s not coming from verticals. We’re spending a lot of time educating. They want the APIs to be built around their specific use cases. They don’t want to be responsible for building the stack itself.

Sramana Mitra: I don’t think anybody is going to build a stack. I think people are going to build on top of the stack.

Daniel Raskin: We’re seeing the same thing. I’m talking about the stack that’s going to be sold to these guys that people are going to build off of.

Sramana Mitra: Because you brought up vertical use cases, all I’m saying is that the opportunity to differentiate in terms of user experience is not in the stack. It’s more in what gets built on top of the stack and what user experiences get enabled by that. From your point of view, where are some opportunities where entrepreneurs could play at this point?

Daniel Raskin: I think it’s an important observation. In driving user experience, the biggest challenge that we’re seeing across these verticals and all these large organizations is traditionally, they’ve set up business units like a cloud business unit or a hardware business unit. They have different units across that organization that has different services that IoT is driving them to converge. In order to create that user experience, they need to break down the barriers across these different business units and create a common profile so that they can use those attributes to do the type of customization that you are talking about.

What we’re seeing, time and time again, across verticals, regardless of what organization we go into, is that we’re having dialogues with them around how they need to use identity to build a common platform to leverage attributes from all the different business units in order to create that omni-channel experience and to use those attributes in a way to enrich that experience. Foundationally, there’s a lot of work to do to change that. That’s where we’re seeing a lot of the reconstitution of organizations. Fragmented technology is now a hindrance to their ability to innovate and roll out these types of IoT services that require cross-business unit collaboration.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Daniel Raskin, VP of Strategy at ForgeRock
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