ForgeRock’s 2015 Identity Summit Highlights the New ‘ROI’– the Return on Identity

Company Executives and Tech Visionary Scott McNealy Joined by Customers and Global Identity Experts to Discuss Digital Transformation, Smart Cities, Privacy and Fostering Lifelong Customer Relationships

SAN FRANCISCO – June 11, 2015 – On May 27-29, ForgeRock®, the leading open platform provider of identity management solutions, hosted its annual U.S.Identity Summit 2015, held in Half Moon Bay, Calif., and featured over 30 sessions and nearly 50 speakers. ForgeRock executives and former Sun Microsystems co-founder and ForgeRock advisor, Scott McNealy, were joined by customers and industry experts to highlight the game-changing and transformative trends driving enterprises’ purchasing decisions around identity management, including:

• Developing a “Return on Identity” strategy that drives digital transformation
• Leveraging identity to create unified, lifetime relationships with customers
• Moving from multi-channel to omni-channel through customer identity
• The impact of Internet of Things (IoT) utilizing next generation identity technology
• Digital consent and new definitions of privacy in the Information Age
• Open source software is the standard for organizations seeking flexible and agile solutions

View the Summit Highlights Videos or select on-demand keynotes and breakout session videos here.

Developing an “ROI” Strategy to Drive Digital Transformation 

ForgeRock CEO Mike Ellis highlighted identity’s role in empowering the C-suite in their digital transformation efforts. “Creating a single view of the customer empowers the shift from multi-channel to an omni-channel customer engagement strategy. Identity solutions from ForgeRock drive this transformation in months, for fast value delivery for enterprises,” Ellis said. “But identities don't just represent a person – they can now represent any device, machine or connected ‘thing.’ By enabling these things, and their associated relationships, businesses can build more personalized user experiences. Today, identity extends from the chip to the cloud.”

David Mathison, curator of the Chief Digital Officer Summit and founder of the CDO Club, moderated a “Digital Transformation” panel that included executives from Accenture, Capital One, Thomson Reuters and Wayin, a hot social media start-up. The quest for the digital customer is driving digital technology change across the enterprise, with business leaders increasingly forging partnerships between marketing and IT for a successful digital transformation.

As Alexander Bolante, managing director at Accenture, summarized, “The ‘Internet of Me’ is changing the way people around the world interact through technology, placing the end user at the center of every digital experience. At the same time, hyper-connected devices are powering an ‘Outcome Economy’ and enabling a new business model that shifts the focus from selling things to selling results. But what’s most significant is that non-IT companies are now placing themselves in the driver’s seat.”

To further drive home the Digital Transformation story, Jen McClure, president of the Society for New Communications Research, added, “AirBnB's market cap is greater than many hotel chains and they don't own any property.”

Jason Carmichael, manager, enterprise architecture with Availity, said that Digital Transformation is, “allowing our customers to have seamless, frictionless access and a streamlined workflow.” When asked about their own Digital Transformation path, each of the panelists discussed their business agendas; for example, for Jan Lӧffler, Zalando’s head of platform engineering, it has been about the speed in which to innovate; Jeff Bagby, Thomson Reuters’ head of collaboration and identity, needed scalable technology; Cathy Rector, previously of Vantiv, required a platform to help with partnership channels that also enabled federation.

Lӧffler recommended that organizations undertaking digital transformation initiatives don't try to invent things on their own and rather leverage partners so that the purchasing organization can lean on their core competencies.

Rector said, “Bring in experts. We had to resist the temptation to do it ourselves and learn as we go. It was critical to get it right out of the gate and set strong logical and physical frameworks for the future."

Leveraging Identity to Create Lifelong Relationships

Technology industry veteran Scott McNealy reiterated his well-known mantra around why you need to know “who's who, what's what and who gets access to what.” Additionally, he shared his views on the importance of the user experience.

McNealy further commented on disruptive businesses such as Google, explaining, "Disruption happens so quickly today that it will blindside many businesses. For example, combining the Uber app with driverless cars will destroy a lot of traditional cab companies. I have to be honest, I trust Google programmers more than I trust most drivers on the road. If you're going to survive, your business strategy must be controversial."

As Thomson Reuters executives described, identity management is a powerful way to establish and maintain customer relationships and profiles – regardless of whether a customer changes email addresses or experiences major life changes.

“To maximize your Return on Identity, businesses must have one unified, informed view of the customer,” reiterated Daniel Raskin, ForgeRock’s vice president of strategy and marketing. “You need a single intelligent customer profile for engagement to respond with value and context. Personalization through identity creates stickier offerings that ultimately foster more customer loyalty.”

How “The Digital Self” and Smart Cities will Transform Engagement

Lasse Andresen, CTO and co-founder of ForgeRock illustrated a number of use cases that cities could implement using ForgeRock's identity solutions – for example, a future identity-enabled police car heading to an emergency situation. In a smart city, the police car could talk to the connected-street signals to turn them green. The car would also be able to communicate with other smart cars to let them know to slow down or get out of the way.

The keynote from Frank Gillett, vice president and principal analyst serving CIOs at Forrester Research, focused on the power of Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and connected products to add contextual information to “the digital self” and in turn create new possibilities for companies to win, serve and retain customers.

“IoT has huge potential to improve customer experience, engagement, and re-purchase because it enriches and deepens relationship. For relationships to work, they have to be rooted in identity, both of the customers and all things that offer contextual data,” said Gillett during his keynote at the Identity Summit. So most digital relationships will use identity – and to be the most effective, it will be within the context of lifetime relationships with customers and employees across their different jobs, careers and other affiliations at global scope.

In the future, the identity of a device will interact with the identity of a user, enabling identity to drive marketing as a powerful tool to interact in an informed way with customers, community members and suppliers. The biggest trend is also the ability to link identity to real-time, contextual information.

Redefining Privacy and Digital Consent

Michelle Finneran Dennedy, vice president and chief privacy officer at Intel Security, and adjunct faculty instructor at INI at Carnegie Mellon University, called upon businesses to use new privacy requirements and specifications to engineer better and more objectively respectful data-centric systems that use identity as a critical tool.

Comparing the privacy market to the currency market, Dennedy noted that privacy can be functionally defined as the authorized processing of personally identifiable data, according to fair, legal, moral and ethical standards.  “Toolsets such as ForgeRock help manage contextual moments of personas, over time, so that data collected about users can be shared contextually and ethically, for the entire lifespan of that data,” concluded Dennedy.

Eve Maler, ForgeRock's vice president of innovation and emerging technology, also covered issues of digital consent and privacy. “As digital technology is used more and more to engage customers and citizens, proactively providing digital sharing controls has become essential,” said Maler.

For the past few years, there has been a strong focus on building a common standard, UMA, to manage privacy and consent. Now that the standard is complete, the next phase will be in implementation and adoption. Maler demonstrated how data sharing can happen from the patient's personal health record portal to her husband, and from her IoT implantable cardiac defibrillator to her doctor. All of the patient’s personal data would be protected under what ForgeRock referred to as Consent 2.0, which conforms to the following principles:

• Context – the right moment to make the decision to share
• Control – the ability to share just the right amount
• Choice – the true ability to say no and change your mind (revoke access)
• Respect – regard for one's wishes and preferences

Continuing on the success of the U.S. Summit, ForgeRock has announced its partnership with the CDO Summit and will be co-hosting the Fall 2015 Identity Summit Series in London, Amsterdam and Düsseldorf.

Supporting Resources

ForgeRock Identity Platform (https://www.forgerock.com/platform/)
ForgeRock Blog (https://forgerock.com/blog/)
ForgeRock Customers (https://www.forgerock.com/our-customers/)
ForgeRock on Twitter (https://twitter.com/ForgeRock)
ForgeRock on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/pages/ForgeRock/101648653214231)
Identity Summit Series 2015 (http://summits.forgerock.com/)
About ForgeRock
The ForgeRock Identity Platform™ transforms the way millions of customers and citizens interact with businesses and governments online, providing better security, building relationships, and enabling new cloud, mobile, and IoT offerings from any device or connected thing. ForgeRock serves hundreds of brands like Morningstar, Vodafone, GEICO, TomTom, and Pearson, as well as governments like Norway, Canada, and Belgium, among many others. Headquartered in San Francisco, California, ForgeRock has offices in London, Bristol, Grenoble, Oslo, Singapore, and Vancouver, Washington. ForgeRock is privately held, backed by leading global venture capital firms Accel Partners, Foundation Capital, and Meritech Capital. For more information and free downloads, visithttps://www.forgerock.com or follow ForgeRock on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/forgerock.

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