Are one company's castoffs another company's treasure?

Open source startup ForgeRock this week is celebrating its first year in business, thanks in part to technology giant Oracle.

The core of ForgeRock identity offerings were born at Sun Microsystems, which has since been acquired by Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL). ForgeRock has managed to take a number of open source technologies started at Sun, including the OpenSSO single sign on and identity platform, and position them as the foundation of a growing business. According to ForgeRock, the technologies that it is now building and evolving might not have had a future with Oracle, which has created an opportunity for the startup.

Simon Phipps, chief strategy officer at ForgeRock, noted that businesses have been expressing a keen interest in Sun's identity middleware platform. Phipps previously served as the chief open source officer at Sun.

"Over the last year, something like three quarters of the companies that have approached us had evaluated the software and were ready to put it into production, but then discovered there was no way to get a subscription for it," Phipps said. "So we've met their needs with a subscription that includes both a service-level agreement and a guarantee of ongoing development."

Phipps added that companies had downloaded the identity software as open source technology in order to do proof-of-concept testing. He noted that the other 25 percent of ForgeRock's clients are former Sun customers that found that Oracle's offering didn't match their needs.