Former Sun Execs Land at ForgeRock

Three former Sun Microsystems executives have set up shop at an open-source enterprise application software provider called ForgeRock.

Former Sun executives Simon Phipps, Lasse Andresen and Hermann Svoren have joined Oslo-based ForgeRock in prominent positions. ForgeRock is the official steward of the ForgeRock I3 Open Platform project.

"The ForgeRock I3 Open Platform provides a secure and integrated application platform comprising premier-quality portal, identity, access and federation management solutions, as well as an Enterprise Service Bus that glues all your enterprise business services together," the company said in a news release May 10. "The I3 Open Platform is built from ... open-source projects including OpenAM (based on OpenSSO), OpenESB, OpenIdM and OpenPortal (based on Liferay Portal)."

In the announcement, ForgeRock "provided details [on] some [of] their new OpenAM Identity Management customers" and announced changes to its leadership team.

Simon Phipps, former chief open-source officer at Sun, "will be joining the ForgeRock board and executive team as chief strategy officer. Phipps brings his experience of open-source communities, governance and open standards to the company. He joins chief executive officer Lasse Andresen and director of sales Hermann Svoren." Andresen was CTO for Central & Northern Europe at Sun, while Svoren was a client executive. Phipps also is a director of the Open Source Initiative and board adviser of Open Source for America.

Moreover, the company said, "Just three months after its official launch, ForgeRock has provided both support subscriptions and training for open-source software from its portfolio to a broad range of customers including Betfair, the world's largest online gambling service provider and NBS AS, a Norwegian state railway company. ... NSB AS, Norwegian State Railways, is one of Norway's foremost transport companies, with roots going back as far as the launch of Norway's first railway service in 1854. The Group's main activities are passenger transport by train and bus and rail freight operations. The NSB Group consists of a number of wholly owned and partly owned subsidiaries."

"We planned to go live with IaM [Identity Access Management] based on OpenSSO this spring. ForgeRock is offering support that will enable us to achieve this using OpenAM without major disruptions of the project," Jan Christiansen, director of NSB, said in a statement. "ForgeRock is a new company, but with a very strong team consisting of well-known professionals from the IaM field. We expect ForgeRock to be responsive, professional and effective in helping NSB to achieve our goals."

Essentially, ForgeRock was formed to fill the void Oracle left when it ended support for Sun's OpenSSO project, company officials said. "OpenSSO is an open-source access management and federation server platform. ... OpenSSO will continue to be developed and supported by ForgeRock under the name of *OpenAM," reads the Wikipedia entry on OpenSSO. "Announced by Sun in July 2005, OpenSSO is based on Sun Java System Access Manager and is the core of Sun's commercial access management and federation product, OpenSSO Enterprise (formerly Sun Access Manager and Sun Federation Manager)."