Published on the 24/02/2015 | Written by Beverley Head
Identity and access management company ForgeRock is eyeing Australian opportunities on the back of its work on the NZ RealMe initiative…
With just half a dozen customers in this region, identity and access management company ForgeRock might appear just a bit player.
But when one of those customers is the New Zealand Government which uses ForgeRock’s OpenAM platform in its RealMe citizen identification and authentication initiative, the true heft of the company emerges.
RealMe allows users to sign onto multiple services using a single password and ID. It’s likely to play a key role in the NZ$1.5 billion transformation project currently underway at the New Zealand Inland Revenue Department.
Australia has already proposed something similar as part of the recent Financial Systems Inquiry in a bid to provide streamlined, but secure and authenticated access to a range of online services.
ForgeRock already has a toehold in Australia, thanks to a sale to the NSW Department of Education, but according to Allan Foster, vice president, the company has ambitions to grow in this region. It currently has a handful of people in Australia and New Zealand, but plans to grow headcount in the region to at least 20.
ForgeRock, which was founded in 2010 on the back of technology which had been owned by Sun Microsystems (Sun founder Scott McNealy remains an advisor to ForgeRock), essentially sells open platform Identity Relationship Management solutions that can be used for individuals or devices – connected for example in an internet-of-things deployment. In January it announced a planned integration with FireEye’s Threat analytics system to provide security incident detection and response management.
It already has customers in New Zealand such as Vodafone NZ, Spark Telecom NZ and the New Zealand Department of internal Affairs.
Eve Maler, vice president of innovation and emerging technology, who has been working on the RealMe initiative said that she was currently discussing with the RealMe team not only identification and authentication, but how that could be extended to deal with delegation of authority. For example when a chartered accountant needs access to company data or an adult offspring needs to assume a duty of care for a parent with dementia.
Maler said that ForgeRock was now working on an open source project to develop systems to support user-managed access.
