ForgeRock Signs on to Deliver Salesforce.com Identity Connect

ForgeRock and Salesforce.com (CRM) have inked an OEM agreement that places ForgeRock’s identity and access management (IAM) technology at the core of Salesforce’s new Identity Connect offering. The companies are touting this as the first such OEM agreement Salesforce has signed.

Salesforce Identity Connect was designed to enable enterprises to seamlessly integrate with existing on-premises identity directories using Salesforce Identity. ForgeRock seems to have a notion of developing next-generation, cloud-based IAM through its Open Identity Stack. The company is aiming to offer customers high-scale identity and security to businesses and externally facing cloud applications.

“We are delivering Salesforce Identity Connect to create a bridge between existing on-premise directory solutions and Salesforce,” said Chuck Mortimore, vice president of product management for Salesforce Identity at Salesforce.com, in a prepared statement. “Salesforce selected ForgeRock because of their leadership in delivering an agile, highly scalable, easy-to-customize set of identity services for extending user identities beyond the traditional firewall and into the cloud, providing a clear path for CIOs to embrace the cloud as the identity platform of the future.”

As a Salesforce.com partner, it looks like a good opportunity for ForgeRock, which is an open platform provider of IAM solutions. As a Salesforce.com partner, ForgeRock has a good opportunity here. And Salesforce doesn’t OEM software from other vendors frequently—and it’s unlikely a decision the company makes lightly.

Now, how this might affect Salesforce.com channel partners isn’t yet known, but it could be a new add-on element to their business if Salesforce looks to enable such partners. Identity Connect is meant to reduce the difficulty of transitioning identity management to the cloud so it’s simple for organizations to securely manage, provision, federate and reconcile user identities in real-time between on-premise apps and the Salesforce platform.

“Through our collaboration, the ForgeRock solution embedded within Salesforce Identity Connect will provide high business value and empower the CIO/CTO to extend identity data management to the cloud,” said Mike Ellis, ForgeRock CEO, in a prepared statement.