Startup Stormpath makes its debut today with an identity and access-control cloud-based service primarily intended for use by software development teams that are building web applications.
"You don't have to worry about storing passwords, or groups and roles for users," says Alex Salazar, CEO of Stormpath. The cloud service can be used in a variety of ways to provide a ready-made authentication layer and workflow process that developers can turn to for use in programming environments.
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Salazar, who co-founded Stormpath with Chief Technology Officer Les Hazlewood in 2010, said today marks general availability of a service that is priced from "free" to software developers to between $20 per month to $2,000 per month per application for a range of premium services.
The more expensive versions of the service include support for Active Directory and LDAP integration into the developer's Web application, for example, along with audit logging. Salazar said the service, which has been in beta with enterprise customers, is mainly being used by developers with externally facing Web-based applications. Stormpath cloud service for authentication and access control has been designed to work well with the Apache Shiro and Spring Framework open-source development environments.
Stormpath's identity-management service competes not only against open-source cloud provider ForgeRock with its Open SSO product but also products from IBM and Oracle that could be seen as alternatives, says Salazar.
The San Mateo, Calif.-based startup, which has about 20 employees, today also announced it has received $8.2 million in venture funding led by New Enterprise Associates and Pelion Venture Partners, with participation from Flybridge Capital Partners. This follows an earlier round of about $1.7 million.
Ellen Messmer is senior editor at Network World, an IDG publication and website, where she covers news and technology trends related to information security. Twitter: @MessmerE. Email: emessmer@nww.com.
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