Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Daniel Raskin, VP of Strategy at ForgeRock (Part 1)

Daniel enlightens us on the identity side of IoT and discusses use cases in automobiles and transportation in this interview.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with some introduction about yourself as well as ForgeRock.

Daniel Raskin: I’m the VP of Strategy at ForgeRock. I have a long history in the identity and access management space, stemming from Sun Microsystems, which was one of the largest commercial open source identity and access management businesses. I was their Chief Identity Strategist and ran their identity portfolio. I’m continuing to do all kinds of great things in identity here at ForgeRock.

ForgeRock has very strong ties to Sun Microsystems. Many know that Sun was this phenomenal company in research and development around software and hardware. What a lot of people don’t realize is that Sun had one of the largest commercial identity and access management businesses in the world. They were very focused on trying to solve how you deliver identity for massive scale customer-facing kinds of scenarios back in the days when people were not thinking about that. It just so happens that when Oracle bought Sun, it was an inflection point.

Oracle bought Sun, but their traditional legacy identity system focused on internal employees and compliance. Sun was focused on that external open source world, which is not the kind of thing that Oracle relishes in. They killed that portfolio. There were five guys at Sun who said, “There’s this amazing portfolio focused on massive scale customer-facing stuff that’s going on out there. On top of that, we’re seeing inflection points where every CEO is asking their CIO to shift their investment from internal operation to external operations and help him drive top line revenue.” They founded ForgeRock in Norway and have been going strong ever since.

We’ve been growing at a crazy pace with over 500 enterprise and government customers split evenly between North America and international. We have great customers across every vertical. The use cases are endless. It’s a really exciting time to be at ForgeRock.

Sramana Mitra: Is this a venture-funded company or a bootstrapped company?

Daniel Raskin: It’s a venture-funded company. In the first year of their operations, ForgeRock didn’t get any venture capital. In fact, they didn’t need venture capital because they had started landing pretty large customers very quickly. Scott McNealy saw the opportunity and saw that the company was growing fast organically and talked to the founders about the opportunity not to just grow a great company, but to grow the next billion dollar valuated commercial open source company. They took Series A from Excel Partners and did Series B with Foundation Capital. We just did a Series C in 2014. We’ve taken about a little over $50 million in capital.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Daniel Raskin, VP of Strategy at ForgeRock
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