Gluu was founded in 2009 with the goal of providing an easier way to manage an organizational federation service. 

When we started, traditional web access management platforms like SiteMinder and Oracle Web Manager were too heavy and cumbersome. Our mission was to create a lightweight utility for organizations to quickly launch a federation service in the cloud that could map to backend identity stores like Active Directory or LDAP. 

With this in mind, and 2 years of development later, the Gluu Appliance was introduced to underserved US universities. Leveraging an affiliation with InCommon, and Shibboleth for SAML based SSO, higher education proved to be a valuable market. In addition to providing our first customers, working with large and small US universities validated our approach to creating lightweight, affordable, and effective Identity software. 

In 2010, we were approached by MIT to build an advanced identity system that supported OAuth2. As we looked for an open source solution that could function similar to Shibboleth for SAML, we realized there was nothing available to meet our needs. This is when we started the open source OX Project. 

Now, as the SAML market matures, we see OAuth2 and OX as the future of Cloud Identity, and the future of Gluu. With the OpenID Connect standard set to be finalized in the upcoming months, we look forward to helping organizations of all sizes prepare for the OpenID Connect internet identity revolution with enterprise grade, standards based, open source software.