In our 5 minutes with profiles, MEF members talk about their business, their aspirations for the future and the wider mobile industry. This week, Vice President of Global Telecoms and Media Industry Tim Barber introduces ForgeRock.

What does ForgeRock do?

ForgeRock is the Digital Identity Management company transforming the way organisations interact securely with customers, employees, devices, and things. Organisations adopt the ForgeRock Identity Platform as their digital identity system of record to monetise customer relationships, address stringent regulations for privacy and consent (GDPR, HIPAA, FCC privacy, etc.), and leverage the internet of things.

ForgeRock serves hundreds of brands, including Morningstar, Vodafone, GEICO, Toyota, TomTom, HSBC, and Pearson, as well as governments like Norway, Canada, and Belgium, securing billions of identities worldwide. Among our more than 750 customers are some of the largest global organisations in a variety of industries, including financial services, retail and consumer goods, telecom and media, government and public sector, industrial, automotive, health care and more.

When did you launch and what growth have you seen?

ForgeRock was originally founded in 2010 after Sun Microsystems was acquired by Oracle, with Sun’s OpenAM identity and access management open source project spun out as a new entity. Since the company’s inception, the ForgeRock Identity Platform has been used by top global brands to create a single view of their customers, support omnichannel business models, and deliver personalised customer experiences. In 2013, customers pioneered the use of identity management for not only human identity but also devices and digital services. The demand for ForgeRock solutions today is driven by the explosive growth of IoT, and the accelerating need for Customer Identity and Access Management technologies to secure all nature of consumer transactions in financial services, retail, and service sector business cases.

What are your main goals?

ForgeRock is transforming the way that organisations approach identity and access management. Our aim is to enable organisations to accelerate their digital transformation journey by ensuring identity and trust are at the core of everything they do.

Earlier this year ForgeRock announced that it had reached $100 million in sales in 2016, and also announced several advances in its product lines, specifically in the IoT/edge security space and in the Cloud Foundry/microservices field.

Additionally, ForgeRock has been recognised by the analyst community as a leader in digital identity. KuppingerCole, the leading global analyst firm covering digital identity, recently named ForgeRock as an Overall Leader in its Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) Compass Report; Gartner placed ForgeRock as the leading Visionary in its Access Management Magic Quadrant.

These trends – strong financial performance, technology innovation, and industry validation of ForgeRock’s strategic vision – point the way forward for the company. ForgeRock fully expects to maintain its leadership position in the burgeoning CIAM market, and is also one of the very few providers of identity solutions with proven experience in the Internet of Things (IoT) field. These two initiatives – IoT and CIAM – will define the identity market in the years ahead, and ForgeRock is ideally positioned to grow quickly on both fronts.

What aspect of mobile is most exciting to you right now?

We believe the mobile industry is at an important inflection point in its evolution, driven by a combination of a) digital transformation, b) the internet of things, and c) privacy regulation. These three interconnected forces are transforming the mobile industry as an eco-system of companies and organisations, which presents some really interesting challenges. Observing the mobile industry from our perspective in the identity space, we’re already seeing interactions between mobile devices, connected cars and connected home systems – interactions made possible by digital identity.

What’s the most critical issue that will hit mobile within the next 12 months?

Mobile vendors are looking to maximise new market opportunities by offering consumers a secure and seamless experience across multiple lines of business. Identity is fast emerging as the core foundation on which companies are building their digital transformation strategies, across their entire mobile ecosystem. Getting this foundation right serves two very critical objectives:

• As people use devices to connect to things and consume services across an ever increasing array of digital channels, identity smooths access to services and applications, which is essential to unlocking scale of supply.
• A strong foundation built on identity instills trust, which is essential to unlocking scale of demand.