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April 23rd, 2013 by
The Smoking Monkey –
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CEO?
There are times in life where you need to take a risk. This is one of those times …
Last week we held ForgeRock’s Exec Team offsite in Bristol, UK. We spent the days discussing ForgeRock strategy and in the evenings we socialized. (A great attribute of the Bristol office is that the basement has been converted into a cozy pub with working tap!)
As the evening progressed a guitar appeared and CEO Mike Ellis was caught playing a nifty, impromptu riff. Although intended for a small group of listeners, I could not resist sharing this secret clip with the greater ForgeRock community.
For me, the clip is a reflection on what life is like at ForgeRock. Beyond IAM, we have talented people from all over the world — Musicians, Artists, Athletes, Writers, etc. Mike, Lasse and team have done a great job recruiting the “best of the best” and it not only makes our end product better, but also makes life at ForgeRock so much more fun.
Can’t wait until we catch Mike singing next. Maybe we’ll find out he’s a Soprano!?!?! Apologies in advance Mike!
From June 12-14 you are going to want to be in Pacific Grove, CA! ForgeRock is hosting its Open Identity Summit and will be talking about everything OpenAM, OpenIDM and OpenDJ.
Scott McNealy and Pat Patterson are confirmed as keynote speakers and a more detailed agenda will be rolling out next week.
A call for paper is opened, but not for long. You have up to May 6th to submit your proposals for presentations.
Also, register and book your hotel ASAP. Space at Asilomar is filling up quick!
We’ve been thinking about this since the begining of ForgeRock, and we’ve finally set a date, a great location and even lined up Keynote speakers.
Join us on June 12th to 14th, 2013, in Pacific Grove, California for the first ForgeRock Open Identity Summit, an event for and with the community of the OpenAM, OpenDJ and OpenIDM projects. The agenda is still work in progress and will be previewed soon. But you can be part of it. A call for paper is opened, but not for long. You have up to May 6th to submit your proposals for presentations. Don’t wait for the last minutes !
A note on logistics, please make sure to book your hotel, registration is not complete until you’ve booked your room! Space at Asilomar is filling up, so we encourage you to register ASAP to reserve your spot.
Today is a very busy day at ForgeRock Grenoble engineering center, with the visit of Jamie, our VP of engineering, engineers for UK and our partner ProfiQ.
It took us some time to evaluate and refine the roadmap for OpenDJ, but it’s finally there. We’ve updated the Roadmap on the wiki, and set a date for the next release of OpenDJ.
The first change decided is that the next release will be versioned 2.6. We got the feedback that the versioning scheme with Xpress releases and final releases with the same version number is confusing. Moving forward, we will try to keep the following scheme : a stable release will have an even minor number and development releases will have an odd number.
We’ve also set the date for the release to end of Q2 of 2013 (end of June).
The REST to LDAP service has now been integrated in OpenDJ server, although not fully featured yet. The team is working really hard to deliver the remaining features by June, and closing the few remaining important defects. If you want to start evaluating the REST to LDAP service, just grab a recent nightly build. Mark is doing a great job of documenting the REST features as they become available.
We will soon make the RPM and Debian packages available for tests with the nightly builds, along with the new upgrade mechanism, and then enter a cycle of stabilization before the 2.6.0 release.
Feedback is important for us, so please download and test the nightly builds, report success via email or issues in our bug tracking tool.
Today is a great day! Early this morning, ForgeRock announced that Foundation Capital and Accel Partners invested $15M in the company. It’s our Series B financing and will be used to grow engineering, sales, and marketing. We have very ambitious product plans so a big chunk of investment will drive that too.
Between my last job @ Agari and my current job @ ForgeRock, I devoted all of 2012 to Series B Fundraising! Great learning experience, but also extremely challenging with many ups and downs. Being drilled by investors forces you to be really crisp around the value of your company and what drives success. Also forces you to become extremely familiar with all the coffee shops on Sandhill Rd. Recap of some of the coverage from todays announcement along with a link to the original press release.
DevoxxFR 2013, the conference for passionate developers that took place in Paris France last week , is over and the long easter week-end after it was well appreciated. The 3 days conference has been great for ForgeRock, and so busy for the whole staff that I couldn’t find the time to blog or even tweet during the conference. I spent most of my time on the booth, and didn’t get a chance to see any session. The only sessions I could fully participate in were the JUG Leaders BOF and my own Conference presentation about “Security for enterprises in a cloudy and mobile world” (See the presentation in French, on Parleys). That presentation was well attended and seemed to have caught interest, by judging from the number of questions that were asked during and after the presentation. Our booth has been busy. We’ve had interesting discussions with developers, architects, consultants about our company, about our products. We met a few members of our community, already using our products, and even customers
We’ve also discussed with a few engineers interested in the job positions that we have open in our Research and Development center in Grenoble, both in product development and quality engineering.
I’d like to thank the organizers for the great conference. And I hope that we’ll be able to have a strong presence next year.
I will be at the LavaJUG (Java User Group from Clermont-Ferrand, France) this Thursday from 19:00 to 21:00, presenting our experience with the OpenDJ project with building a highly scalable and high performance server in Java. The presentation is based on what I’ve already presented in a few JUG in France (AlpesJUG, MarsJUG, PoitouCharentesJUG,…) and Switzerland (JUG Lausanne), but has been updated with regards to GarbageFirst GC and the most recent HotSpot JVM.
And next week, from March Wednesday 27th to Friday 29th, you will find ForgeRock at the Devoxx France conference.
Come to our conference session about “Enterprise Security in a Cloudy and Mobile World” (the session is in French). The session is on Friday 29th, from 11:45 to 12:35, in Miles Davis room. Mark it on your calendar, and if you miss it, make sure you stop by our booth (B3) to say hello and talk with some of our engineers. We will also be present at the HackerGarten on Wednesday from 14:00 to 18:00, should you want to have fun with one of our open source projects : OpenAM, OpenDJ or OpenIDM.
Join us on June 12th to 14th, 2013, in Pacific Grove, California for the first 
