Identity and Access Management Providers Raise Millions in June

Investors see something great in Identity and Access Management. So great, in fact, that they are willing to put over $100 million down. Two top solutions providers, Okta and ForgeRock, received those millions this month with the goal of expanding market presence and increasing service offerings, according to Jonathan Vanian at GigaOm and Sean Kerner at eWeek.

Okta received $75 million in a series E financing round on June 9, which brings their total funding to $155 million. The San Francisco based company plans to use the cash to open an office in Sydney, Australia, as well as to improve their enterprise identity network platform’s ability to help companies navigate access in a world of SaaS and the cloud.

Specifically, here’s the problem according to Vanian:

While in the past a system administrator could set up a virtual private network (VPN) to prevent unwanted entry, an organization that now has its infrastructure spread over several cloud providers has a more difficult task to accurately monitor company access. Couple that with the fact that employees are now using mobile devices to gain entrance, and identity monitoring becomes much more of a pain.”

And here is Okta’s solution:

Okta wants to remedy this with its cloud-based service that helps IT administer all of their applications. After signing up for the service, an IT administrator can connect Okta with his Active Directory, said Okta COO Frederic Kerrest. Through this connection, Okta can then secure and provide access to a company’s cloud infrastructure with the same access information the administrators had already set up in their original user directory.

ForgeRock scored a bit less cash at $30 million on June 19, with a total to date of $52 million. Kerner says the goal is to fuel ForgeRock’s global expansion and drive adoption of their open-source Identity Relationship Management Technology. ForgeRock CEO Michael Ellis, according to Kerner, “that ForgeRock emerged from the open-source Sun Microsystems platform for identity, and ForgeRock over the last four years has extended the technology.”

Some history:

 In the aftermath of Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems in 2010, Oracle did not continue to support a number of open-source efforts that Sun had been developing, including several identity-management technologies.

ForgeRock started in 2010 as a way to support and extend open-source identity technologies, including the OpenSSO (single sign-on) platform that Sun first began back in 2005.

Ellis believes that their open-source strategy provides ForgeRock an advantage in the marketplace, but does admit his company faces a challenge in another area:

“The biggest challenge for ForgeRock is brand recognition,” Ellis said.

I foresee a marketing campaign or two in ForgeRock’s future using their new cash.

For Vanian’s piece on Okta, click here.

For Kerner’s piece on ForgeRock, click here.