Suneet Shah saw something missing in the fast-growing area of identity access management.
After working for years developing and collaborating on Identity and Access Management (IAM) systems at companies like Oracle and Novell (now Microfocus), Suneet identified a lack of options in the IAM space. At that time, solutions from large vendors, while functionally capable, were largely proprietary, often resulting from acquisitions and poor integration between stack components. Solutions from smaller vendors were often point solutions. Few, if any, offered platforms that were open in nature and developer-friendly.
So, Suneet co-founded OpenIAM with a team that had extensive technical and business experience. They created an IAM system from the ground up that was compliant with modern standards and equally easy for business users and developers to adapt. The result was a unified IAM platform capable of providing features required by the business and developers with the resources and customization they need. “Our idea was to create a platform to do a lot of these things in one place,” said Suneet. “It was built on an open architecture that allowed developers to extend it, work with it, and build from there.”
Large enterprises with thousands of employees, as well as smaller companies, now rely on OpenIAM. The number of users OpenIAM serves for each customer—whether internal (workforce identity) or external (customer identity)—numbers from hundreds to tens of thousands and more. The company’s customers stretch across markets, including government, financial services, telecommunications, education, healthcare, manufacturing, publishing, and retail.
Each OpenIAM customer requires a unique set of capabilities, so Suneet and his team built their solution on an open framework that allows customers to introduce business-specific customization. For instance, customers approached OpenIAM to create network access for employees working from home during the Coronavirus pandemic. OpenIAM responded quickly, adding infrastructure for customers in a fraction of the time compared to their competitors.
“While we are always executing on our roadmap, we also try to be agile when our customers need an essential feature,” Suneet said. Instead of delivering something a year later, we’re often delivering them a month or two later. We’ve worked really hard to become good partners for our customers.”
Cloud Migration in 30 Minutes
OpenIAM’s partnership with Linode began after a mishap with another cloud provider’s data center led a colleague to suggest that the company consider using Linode. In half an hour, OpenIAM’s infrastructure—with clients all over the world—was up and running on Linode.
“Linode is just a really easy environment for us to work with. We can spin up instances in literally a minute and have that environment up and ready to use. It’s very cost-effective if we don’t need it for that long, so it’s really a very fair model in that respect. Plus, it’s also a fairly complete environment in terms of the services we need.” – Suneet Shah, Co-Founder & CTO, OpenIAM
Linode empowers OpenIAM to create more innovative solutions for its customers. Using the same tools and processes, Suneet and his team enjoy hindrance-free innovation that allows them to maintain their place as an industry leader. While OpenIAM has partnered with other cloud providers in the past, Suneet praised Linode’s customer service as far and away more responsive and attentive to OpenIAM’s scalability and support needs.
“Linode Customer Support Is incredibly responsive,” Suneet said. “We send messages and get responses back within a really short amount of time. For us, being an agile company, that works out really well.”
Suneet pointed out that Linode’s 24/7/365 support—provided at no cost to every customer—is usually faster in responding to their inquiries than paid tiers with other providers. “With Linode, we actually never have to think about what we can’t do,” said Suneet. “We take it (Linode) for granted, and it just works for us.”
