ForgeRock was born when Oracle bought Sun Microsystems and planned to retire Sun's identity software. A group of former Sun employees in Norway took the open source code and kept building it themselves. The company formed there in 2009 and later moved to San Francisco. By its 2021 IPO it supported billions of identities, used for everything from shopping and banking to signing in at work. Its stated vision was simple: a world where you never log in again.

OpenAM Becomes a Business

ForgeRock's products grew from Sun open source projects. Access management came from OpenAM, the directory from OpenDJ, and identity management from OpenIDM. The community versions stayed free, while companies paid for licenses to the enterprise platform. The pitch fit a world of apps and connected devices, where each customer needed one safe identity across many places. By April 2020 ForgeRock had raised $230 million from investors.

Twenty-Five, Then Thoma Bravo

ForgeRock sold 11 million shares at $25 each in September 2021 and listed on the New York Stock Exchange as FORG. A year later, in October 2022, the private equity firm Thoma Bravo agreed to buy it for $2.3 billion in cash. The deal closed on August 23, 2023. Thoma Bravo folded ForgeRock into Ping Identity, another identity company it owned.

Cover: Mont Saint-Michel, Axel Herman Haig. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a walled fortress on a rock (ForgeRock, guarding identity).