Until Next Time, Sydney!

Each year, our Identity Live summit series travels around the world to see our prospects, customers and partners. Australia may be the location that’s farthest afield, so it was fantastic to host the extended ForgeRock team and our guests in Sydney a couple of weeks ago for the 2017 edition of Identity Live. Sydney was filled with sunshine and warmth as we returned to the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) on the harbour, the perfect conditions to kick off Identity Live.

We started the day off with an update on ForgeRock’s growth in Asia Pacific. In a little over 2 years, we’ve had great success in bringing the ForgeRock Identity Platform to leading digital businesses in the region. Our CEO, Mike Ellis, followed with a keynote on the state of identity. A notable point Mike made was that there will be 20.5 billion connected things in existence by the end of 2020. It’s not enough to think about digital identity as just a solution for employees and customers, it’s critical for the internet of things (IoT) as well.

Some highlights from the rest of our day:

• Accenture and Forrester, provided the partner and analyst views, respectively.
• Our Regional Director of Customer Engineering, Andrew Latham, presented “Securing Customer Interactions Anytime, Anywhere" featuring a live Amazon Alexa demo with biometrics leader Daon.
• “GDPR, Trust, and Data Privacy” with our own Allan Foster, VP of Strategic Partner Enablement, and Eve Maler, VP of Innovation and Emerging Technologies, was focused on how identity can help to solve privacy regulations and issues. Eve dialed in all the way from the US for this session!
• The panel on “The Evolving Role of Privacy in Digital Transformation” with Victoria Richardson, Chief Strategy Officer at Australian Payments Network, Richard Addiscott, Director of IT Planning, Governance, and Security at Curtin University, Marta Ganko, Director of Privacy and Data Protection at Deloitte, and Peter van Djik, Managing Director at Galexia, was particularly engaging. Our panelists provided unique insights and expertise on current and future privacy challenges and considerations.
• HSBC’s Ian Sorbello shared what one of the largest banks in the world is doing to position digital identity as a strategic initiative in “HSBC Customer Identity Management - Democratised and Commoditised”.
• We closed the day with an interview with special guest, Kirk Pengilly, one of the founding members of rock icons, INXS. Kirk discussed the evolving music landscape, how identity applies across industries and even shared some of his favourite INXS moments. Then he treated us to live acoustic performances of 'Never Tear Us Apart' and 'Don't Change'. It was an amazing way to cap a day of learning and discussions.

You can check out the highlights video  as well as individual session videos on YouTube. Presentations decks are available on SlideShare and you can catch up on the social media action over on Storify.

The following day we held the UnSummit, once again at the MCA. Daniel Raskin, our SVP of Product Management, kicked of this technically-focused day with a review of the ForgeRock Identity Platform Roadmap. Then we split off into various roundtables for a full day of in-depth tech discussions and live demos. It’s always great to get so many smart, passionate individuals in the room to discuss all things identity and ForgeRock.

I’d like to extend a special thank you to our sponsors, Accenture (Global Headliner), Deloitte (Sydney Headliner), and Cyberinc (Rock Star) for helping us make Identity Live Sydney a tremendous success. Truly exciting to see the event grow year after year. And now...onwards to Singapore where we’ll be hosting the UnSummit on September 19th. I hope to see you there!

John Donovan is Regional Vice President, APJ at ForgeRock