Excellence - It's Contagious

We’re having a good July. Earlier this month, ForgeRock was named a winner of the IoT Security Excellence Award from IoT Evolution World. Then late last week we got word that we’d been named to the Momentum Partners Q2 2017 Watch List – a collection of ten “innovative and breakout” companies in the cybersecurity space. Nice!

The IoT Security Excellence Award honors the “best, most innovative security products and solutions” released in the last twelve months as judged by the editors of TMC’s IoT Evolution World magazine – a group of industry observers that are completely wired into the IoT space. This one is sweet for a couple of reasons.

First, we made a deliberate decision awhile back to bring digital identity solutions to the full range of IoT use cases; the goal is to be THE identity provider for the connected car, smart devices, industrial applications, omnichannel retail, and all the rest. Many of the product innovations we’ve brought to market over the past year or so are directly tied to this IoT strategy. The work we’ve been doing with Cloud Foundry, joining EdgeX Foundry as a founding member along with Dell, our connected car collaboration with Automotive Grade Linux, and the Edge Security offerings we announced in the spring – all of this has been to further our position as the leading provider of digital identity to the IoT.

Second, to qualify for the award, we needed to submit a real-world use case of our technology in action. And here’s where it gets really cool: TomTom, the global leader in navigation, traffic and map products, GPS Sport Watches and fleet management solutions (in other words, one of the key players in the IoT space) is a ForgeRock customer. Our case study that explains how TomTom uses digital identity to secure users and devices, support single sign-on, and engage with millions of consumers worldwide was pretty much our entire entry. It’s great to get the affirmation that TomTom’s digital identity journey is as compelling to the experts at IoT Evolution World as it is to us here at ForgeRock HQ.

Momentum Partners is a boutique cybersecurity-focused investment bank based in San Francisco. The firm’s quarterly Cybersecurity Market Review is closely watched in the security space and within the investor community for its authoritative takes on start-up valuations, M&A and IPO activity, and general industry thought leadership. Each quarter ten companies are selected after Momentum principals carefully weigh feedback from the field, and consider a variety of growth and innovation factors. As they put it in announcing their winners list in 2016: “Together, we identify those companies we believe are uniquely innovative and have tremendous business momentum.” Thanks to Momentum Partners for noticing ForgeRock’s progress, and congrats to our fellow Watch Listers!

So as we move into the second half of the year, we’re jazzed about the recognition from Momentum Partners and IoT Evolution World. It’s the kind of acknowledgement that tells us we’re on the right track, delivering solutions that the market demands. It’s going to be a great summer.

Mike Ellis is Chairman and CEO at ForgeRock. You can follow him on Twitter @mikeellis100