Hi Eric, I just came across this article, and even though I've been involved with this story for a while, it's nice to gain some insider context. Thanks!
Since our IAM solutions relied on these open-source products, these turbulences caused us some headaches. However, because we strongly believe in the principles of open source, we founded the Wren Security initiative to preserve the legacy, see https://wrensecurity.org/. Hopefully, this could be one of the alternatives worth considering. Thanks again, Ondrej.
Fantastic story. Great insights. One thing though: “and those customers invest heavily to make a solution work for their company”. I don’t think anyone ever bought a solution. The customers bought a tool. A tool they invest in heavily to turn into solution. If there’s one thing my last 23 years in the IAM business have taught me, it’s that there are no of the shelf solutions. It’s how you use the tools you buy. Combined with a talented group of colleagues, best practices and common sense.
Other than that, fantastic insight in the world of takeovers. Thank you!
Michiel - I absolutely agree. You've caught me in a little personal, inside joke based on listening to people take the word "solution" and use it contrary to its actual meaning. (People do this a lot in technology.) The services to licenses spend ratio has been roughly 7:1 for as long as the market has been around. During migrations, a customer's biggest economic pain is the sunk cost of the deployments because you never get that back. When a vendor comes in and forces you to spend that money again, that's an onerous ask. And then it takes so long to get the new products implemented.
I joined the Identity world in 2014. I started working on implementing ForgeRock products and it’s amazing to read about all the history of these identity products !
Thank you for providing a wonderful recounting of the Sun-Ping-Oracle-Waveset-Lighthouse-Oblix-ForgeRock-Unbound era of transformation in the realm of IAM. Having enjoyed the experience from a partner side of with pretty much all of these companies and with others as well I really liked your summary. The journey is truly an interesting one and it continues to be the same as you have noted. To add to the OpenSource commentary, it was a truly marvellous ride to share with the ForgeRock team. At Nulli we contributed code and fixes and RFEs through those heady early years and enjoyed the success of an integrator who was fully immersed into the code line of our partner ForgeRock. It was a sad day for us and for the industry when the product moved off of the OpenSource model and we have not obviously been engaged with the code line ever since.
Interestingly there is an open source project out there from the forked code of ForgeRock's community edition and seems to be continuing here: https://github.com/OpenIdentityPlatform
There are moments when I stood back and was like, holy crap, it’s working! I knew we wanted external contributors, but I didn’t really expect it to happen. I’d never done it before, and was making it up as I went along.
The whole cycle of this has taught me a lot about what it means to think strategically.
Hi Eric, I just came across this article, and even though I've been involved with this story for a while, it's nice to gain some insider context. Thanks!
Since our IAM solutions relied on these open-source products, these turbulences caused us some headaches. However, because we strongly believe in the principles of open source, we founded the Wren Security initiative to preserve the legacy, see https://wrensecurity.org/. Hopefully, this could be one of the alternatives worth considering. Thanks again, Ondrej.
Fantastic story. Great insights. One thing though: “and those customers invest heavily to make a solution work for their company”. I don’t think anyone ever bought a solution. The customers bought a tool. A tool they invest in heavily to turn into solution. If there’s one thing my last 23 years in the IAM business have taught me, it’s that there are no of the shelf solutions. It’s how you use the tools you buy. Combined with a talented group of colleagues, best practices and common sense.
Other than that, fantastic insight in the world of takeovers. Thank you!
Michiel - I absolutely agree. You've caught me in a little personal, inside joke based on listening to people take the word "solution" and use it contrary to its actual meaning. (People do this a lot in technology.) The services to licenses spend ratio has been roughly 7:1 for as long as the market has been around. During migrations, a customer's biggest economic pain is the sunk cost of the deployments because you never get that back. When a vendor comes in and forces you to spend that money again, that's an onerous ask. And then it takes so long to get the new products implemented.
Thanks for the feedback and for reading!
Hi Eric,
I joined the Identity world in 2014. I started working on implementing ForgeRock products and it’s amazing to read about all the history of these identity products !
Thanks
L
Thanks for reading Louis!
Hi Eric;
Thank you for providing a wonderful recounting of the Sun-Ping-Oracle-Waveset-Lighthouse-Oblix-ForgeRock-Unbound era of transformation in the realm of IAM. Having enjoyed the experience from a partner side of with pretty much all of these companies and with others as well I really liked your summary. The journey is truly an interesting one and it continues to be the same as you have noted. To add to the OpenSource commentary, it was a truly marvellous ride to share with the ForgeRock team. At Nulli we contributed code and fixes and RFEs through those heady early years and enjoyed the success of an integrator who was fully immersed into the code line of our partner ForgeRock. It was a sad day for us and for the industry when the product moved off of the OpenSource model and we have not obviously been engaged with the code line ever since.
Interestingly there is an open source project out there from the forked code of ForgeRock's community edition and seems to be continuing here: https://github.com/OpenIdentityPlatform
So who knows, the cycle might begin again;
Thanks again
Derek
There are moments when I stood back and was like, holy crap, it’s working! I knew we wanted external contributors, but I didn’t really expect it to happen. I’d never done it before, and was making it up as I went along.
The whole cycle of this has taught me a lot about what it means to think strategically.