Enterprise management platform ForgeRock snaps up $7M

Accel Partners sees the value in more enterprise identity management software, Oracle competitor

The open source vendor behind the I³ Open Identity middleware platform, announced Friday that it raised a $7 million in Series A round of funding from Accel Partners.

The Oslo-based company provides an open platform for customers to organize vendors as well as differentiate individual deployment stages, from procurement to production, in order to maximize customer ROI. Essentially, the company's signature system is a unified platform approach to solve enterprise company’s secure identity management issues. 

The I³ products currently include: OpenAM (Access Manager) for Authentication, SSO, and Cloud-enabled Federation; OpenIDM (Identity Manager), which is a scalable identity lifecycle management and provisioning solution; and OpenDJ (Directory Java, a next gen identity repository.

ForgeRock's CEO and founder Lasse Andresen said that the funding from this round would be focused on new developments.

"Since we are focused on the software and not on consulting or other avenues, we are putting this funding toward R&D to better help the companies we work with," Andresen told me in an interview. "And we are the only open-source platform available in the space for a wide audience of companies from social networing to banks and telecom."

Through its enterprise subscriptions, ForgeRock works with a wide variety of companies -- from start-ups to some of the largest Fortune 100 global enterprises. Founded in 2010, ForgeRock technology already supports operations for many millions of its customer’s end users. Existing subscription customers include: Thomson Reuters, BSkyB, News International, Nokia Siemens Networks, AOL, Toyota, Hellenic Telecom, The California Dept of Justice, and many US and European government departments at both a state and national level.

“We think identity management is a crucial issue for most businesses as they struggle to deliver appropriate information and application support to employees, partners, and customers via a combination of data-centers, the cloud, PCs, and mobile devices. We were very impressed by the customer feedback we received about ForgeRock," said Bruce Golden, Partner, at Accel Partners, in a statement. "We believe ForgeRock is well positioned to deliver the easiest to deploy and highest performance identity management software suite in the market and is unique in being able to address the needs of the largest global businesses, as well as small to mid-size companies.” 

It's also important to note that All ForgeRock's software is open source. That means you always have the freedom to use ForgeRock software for any purpose in your business without the worry of managing licenses -- and users are able to benefit from the skills of the open community around that software.

This Independent Software Vendor is composed of former Sun business and technology experts -- a company acquired by Oracle nearly two years back. 

While Oracle own all the copyrights to its enterprise software, ForgeRock will be selling subscriptions that meet the needs of people using access management while offering strong licensing agreements.

Andresen also explained that this year, ForgeRock will be putting more focus on growing its U.S presence since there is a strong market for an open platform that helps authenticate usership and access to different departmental elements.

Aside from Oracle, ForgeRock's competition includes another big gun: Microsoft. But because of the demand that is present in enterprise software, it may be awhile before small companies like ForgeRock have to really go head-to-head with the recognizable names in the industry.