Last week at the nice Powerscourt Estate, outside Dublin, Ireland, ForgeRock hosted the European Identity Relationship Management Summit, attended by over 200 partners, customers, prospects, users of ForgeRock technologies. What a great European IRMSummit it was !

If you haven’t been able to attend, here’s some highlights:

I heard many talks and discussions about Identity being the cornerstone in the digital transformation of enterprises and organizations. It shifting identity projects from a cost center to revenue generators.

There was lots of focus on consumer identity and access management, with some perspectives on current identity standards and what is going to be needed from the IRM solutions. We’ve also heard from security and analytics vendors, demonstrating how ForgeRock’s Open Identity Stack can be combined with the network security layer or with analytics tools to increase security and context awareness when controlling access.

User Managed Access is getting more and more real, as the specifications are getting close to be finalised and ForgeRock announced the OpenUMA initiative for foster ideas and code around it. See forgerock.org/openuma.

Many talks about Internet of Things and especially demonstration around defining the relationship between a Thing and a User, securing the access to the data produced by the Thing. We’ve seen a door lock being unlocked with a NFC enabled mobile phone, by provisioning over the air the appropriate credentials, a smart coffee machine able to identify the coffee type and the user, pushing the data to a web service, and asking the user for consent to share. There’s a common understanding that all the things will have identities and relations with other identities.

There were several interesting discussions and presentations about Digital Citizens, illustrated by reports from deployments in Norway, Switzerland, Nigeria, and the European Commission cross-border authentication initiatives STORK and eIDAS…

Half a day was dedicated to ForgeRock products, with introductory trainings, demonstrations of coming features in OpenAM, OpenDJ, OpenIDM and OpenIG. During the Wednesday afternoon, I did 2 presentations on OpenIG, demonstrating the ease of integration of OAuth2.0 and OpenID Connect to protect applications and APIs, and on OpenDJ, demonstrating the flexibility and power of the REST to LDAP interface.

All presentations and materials are available online as pdf and now as videos on the ForgeRock’s YouTube page. You can also find here a short summary of the Summit in a video produced by Markus.

The summit wouldn’t be such a great conference if there was no plan for social interactions and fun. This year we had a nice dinner in the Powerscourt house (aka the Castle) followed by live music in the pub. The band was great, but became even better when Joni and Eve joined them for a few songs, for the great pleasure of all the guests.

Of course, I have to admit that the best part of the IRM Summit in Ireland was the pints of Guinness !

To all attendees, thank you for your participation, the interesting discussions and the input to our products. I’m looking forward to see you again next year for the 2015 edition. Sláinte !

As usual, you can find the photos that I’ve taken at the Powerscourt Estate on Flickr. Feel free to copy for non commercial use, and if you do republish them, I would appreciate getting the credit for them.

[Updated on Nov 11] Added link to the highlight video produced by Markus
[Updated on Nov 13] Added link to the slideshare folder where all presentations have been published
[Updated on Nob 24] Added link to the all videos on ForgeRock’s YouTube page