Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Daniel Raskin, VP of Strategy at ForgeRock (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How does your identity work? From the perspective of each unit that is being identified, people are capturing different types of data. The parameters that are being captured from that identity point of view is different. Is that something that is customizable in your solution and that’s up to the industry vertical to configure?

Daniel Raskin: We approach that from a conceptual standpoint. We are making a different assumption around identity data than people have been making in the past. In the past, they’ve been saying, “You need an identity store where you store everything in one area.” This isn’t realistic. You go into enterprises and they have data that they have to pull from databases, directories, and all kinds of things.

Our whole model is the idea of putting in place a common platform that has different types of hooks to pull from all those different types of data sources. What you’ve seen in the past is the nature of how infrastructure has been put together to do this. In the past, it’s been very fragmented. It’s just the nature of how the world has been developed. If you look at the Oracle, CA, and IBMs of the world, they’ve built acquisition architecture that helps them in terms of creating access products and entitlement products. All these different things end up with 22 different products that you use to pull out different attributes. They all have different APIs and different UIs. It tends to create a developer nightmare.

Our whole approach is put one platform in place and expose a common API that all developers can use to pull that data from all those different types of areas. We’re going into places like a Thomson Reuters and helping them consolidate 40 different identity platforms into a single platform so that they can pull data across those different units.

Sramana Mitra: Going back to my original question, what do you see as opportunities for entrepreneurs to play in?

Daniel Raskin: The opportunity, first and foremost, is this whole world about being able to very quickly enable more devices and things and manage that lifecycle. As you’ve mentioned, across lots of different verticals, they are looking for new services to actually not just manage people online, but to manage things online. People are trying to figure out how to do that and offer a different type of omni-channel experience that the legacy infrastructure wasn’t built for. For entrepreneurs who want to reconstitute traditional services, but focusing on applications, devices, and things as opposed to traditional web applications, there’s a huge opportunity to do it better, cleaner, and more elegantly than the traditional vendors have ever done.

The other opportunity is in accelerating how you roll out these services. The speed of scale is a huge issue because a lot of the infrastructure in the past was built for internal controls. Now, you’re talking about how you deliver services to 50 million users. Being able to reconstitute traditional software services focused on mass of scale applications and devices is a completely different game. There’s an open space there.

Finally, because of the CIO’s investment having to shift to external spend, it means you can’t have software that takes 18 to 24 months to deploy. It has to be in four-month cycles that are tied to the business deliverables. That, again, requires a more elegant, more seamless, developer-friendly way of rolling out services. There’s huge opportunity to do that. It’s exactly why ForgeRock exists.

All the people we talk to have the traditional stuff internally. They’re trying to figure out how they manage identity for applications, devices, and things externally to drive revenue. It’s just a very different world. Oftentimes, what we’re seeing is it’s us versus homegrown. It’s not us versus Oracle or CA. It’s because they’re going down that homegrown route because nothing exists for their use case.

Sramana Mitra: Thank you very much. Appreciate your time.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Daniel Raskin, VP of Strategy at ForgeRock
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