2015 Amsterdam Identity Summit

2015 ForgeRock Amsterdam Identity Summit Recap

The second of the three European Identity Summits, hosted by ForgeRock, took place in Amsterdam, at the Conservatorium. A great event and our venue hosts went above and beyond to get everyone comfortable. The great success of this event wouldn’t have been possible without our partners; CDO Summit, and our sponsor Accenture!

The day provided a great mix of industry experts, ForgeRock leaders, and ForgeRock customers that provided insights into their experiences on the road of digital transformation.

The day started with our CEO, Mike Ellis, who focused on the empowerment of CIOs by tapping into the power of identity technology. Through his presentation Mike discussed digital transformation and how identity management in particular powers a more secure and personalized services to customers.

The second keynote of the day was delivered by Ant Allan, Ph.D., Research Vice President of Gartner Research spoke about how Digital business will massively enlarge the scope and scale of IAM, stressing and straining the traditional legacy IAM approaches. CIOs and their IAM leaders must seek new approaches and a new leadership style for their IAM programs that will enable IAM to propel digital business. The complexities of IAM and exigencies of digital business will demand that IAM programs to embrace simplicity and innovation in IAM products and services.

Unfortunately, Ant’s slides are not available for distribution.

ForgeRock’s own Daniel Raskin, VP of Strategy and Marketing, then highlighted how organizations can maximize return on identity in a brave new world. Enterprises and organizations can maximize their ROI (Return on Identity) by viewing identity management as a foundational element of digital services, that can help you improve customer engagement, drive a seamless omni-channel experience and reach new market segments. Was a great presentation.

Royal Philips of the Netherlands is a diversified technology company that is leading the industry in delivering innovative healthcare technologies.  Jan van Zoest, CTO HealthSuite Digital Platform at Philips Healthcare spoke about the Philips HealthSuite Digital Platform. During his session Jan discussed how Philips is designing new healthcare solutions that rely on identity and access management for an improved patient and provider experience as well as enhanced security and privacy of patient data.

ForgeRock’s very own technical product marketing manager, Markus Weber, followed with a session on the new data protection challenges. Safe Harbor ruling by the European Court of Justice, anyone? Markus highlighted the User-Managed-Access (UMA) standard, ForgeRock’s OpenUMA project and how ForgeRock is developing solutions to ensure privacy and trust in the digital world.

The last keynote of the day was right after the lunch break, and was delivered by David Birch, Director of Innovation at Consult Hyperion. In an extremely entertaining way, he explained that in a connected world, everything has identity, everything develops reputation and everything takes part in relationships. ID for the Internet of Things (#IDIoT) is fascinating, scary and difficult at the same time. There were many laughs during David’s presentation!

The first customer case study of the day was delivered by Zalando, a publicly traded e-commerce company with more than 16 million active customers in 15 European markets. Daniel del Hoyo, Software Engineer, Mihai Dumitrescu, Software Engineer and Rob Ojevaar, IAM Architect did a great job describing Zalando’s transition to a cloud-based infrastructure that still supports communication with legacy systems. They showed how to enable secure communications to services that weren’t originally designed with security in mind. Finally, they discussed how they’re using automation to seamlessly deploy Zalando’s new infrastructure, talk about the challenges they’ve faced along the way, and describe their solutions.

Next, Floris Van Den Dool, Managing Director Information Security Services Europe, Africa and Latin America, Accenture talked about what the major dynamics and differences between B2C vs. B2E, what’s really important to each, what’s really not! Floris then got into the implications of design decisions (i.e. social authN, identity analytics) and if customers can really use a single IAM platform to enable both use cases.

Another customer case study was up next, by Swisscom, one of the most famous brands and by far the biggest telco provider in Switzerland. Jens Sonnentrücker and Benjamin Matei, explained how goal for Swisscom was to be able to offer one ID Broker for all services, so that subscribers essentially would be able to “Bring Your Own Identity” (BYOI). If not done this way, each application or service offered by Swisscom would have required a connection with each IDP. By implementing a ForgeRock solution, Swisscom was able to reduce costs spent on administration and significantly upgrade ease of use for the customer base, while also increasing sharing options across service offerings.

Wiebe Niehof, Technical Product Manager at KPN spoke to us about how they were improving their customer experience. KPN has now started to utilize their Grip platform to loosely couple web applications. This way, a customer can access the KPN web applications through one portal and with one set of credentials, all while specialized teams can continue to innovate on their product autonomously. Wiebe also gave us a quick demo on the Grip platform.

Lasse Andresen and Stein Myrseth showed demos in the areas of privacy and consent (UMA), IoT, and identity relationships.

We thoroughly enjoyed the 2015 Amsterdam Identity Summit! Over 150 attendees joined us to talk digital transformation, IoT, and much, much more. It was great to meet customers, potential customers, and partners and discuss the exciting things that are happening with identity. We’d also like to extend a special thank you, again, to our co-sponsor Accenture and our partners CDO Club for making the Identity Summit possible.