Commercial Open Source Software

Open Source Phoenix Rising: ForgeRock One Year After

ForgeRock announced results from its first year of operations along with the acquisition of ApexIdentity, bringing their expertise in identity and access management to ForgeRock’s projects.

Simon Phipps, Chief Strategy Officer at ForgeRock, answered few questions about ForgeRock’s story and business trategy.

Simon, can you tell us more about ForgeRock’s origins?

Lasse and the other founders (not including me) got ready in mid-2009 once it was clear Oracle were unlikely to retain Sun’s enterprise identity middleware. He quit his job in the autumn of 2009 to be ready when the acquisition closed. The company was founded on February 1st 2010 and annoucned on the OpenSSO mailing lists.

How does ForgeRock find partners and acquire customers?

That announcement has been enough to have customers flowing to ForgeRock ever since.  We mentioned early on that we would welcome partner support, and within a short time had over 80 former Sun partners e-mailing us to ask for inclusion in the programme. Since then we have added more layers and we have a growing list of approved consulting and training partners drawn from that list and from companies applying directly to us.

I am sure it required action and work on your part, no matter how easy it sounds. Apparently what you call the “community escrow” benefit works better when former employees leave just in time to (re)create a company supporting the product.

Take advantage of the absence of a corporate actor is about timing in this case. The period of time to replace the former vendor is tiny: just like for the Phoenix the new one rises from the ashes.