have the data you accumulate at all these places like Google, Yahoo, MySpace, Facebook. As a small company, we were learning more about identity. It’s a huge industry, there are lots of products in enterprise. Every system has a login. We wrote open-source libraries that would allow other companies and websites to become players [using OpenID].”
From there, Drebes says, his team seized the emerging business opportunity. “As a company, we made the change from a technology house for open-source software into revenue-producing products,” he says. Besides eliminating the pain of keeping track of many different logins, JanRain’s offering also lets people take their knowledge and preferences with them wherever they go on the Web, so any service can be better targeted to them. “This will make the experience of Web surfing much more personal,” Drebes says. “It’s also a chance to know your customer better.”
The challenge seems to lie in getting enough key players on board—JanRain’s product is compatible with logins from Google, Facebook, and the like—so as to reach a tipping point in users. And then getting Web companies to pay enough for universal logins to sustain the effort. As for JanRain’s competitors, Drebes cites Mountain, View, CA-based VeriSign (NASDAQ: [[ticker:VRSN]]), which has its own OpenID product. But he notes that 80 percent of websites that run OpenID now use JanRain’s open-source code. “We want to be one of the big couple that survive and have a sustainable position,” he says, adding that if they do that, the revenue will come. “It’s very disruptive. Once you get that kind of disruption, those products have no roadmap end site.”
Given the relatively recent surge in Portland tech startups, I asked Drebes for his broader take on the city as an innovation cluster. “It’s a pretty good place for business,” he says. “It’s not the Bay Area or Seattle. You don’t have the VC ecosystem, or quite the concentration of tech companies. For fundraising, it’s more challenging.”
But he adds, “From an operating standpoint, Portland has what we need,” in terms of “broadband access and cloud computing…When I moved here [in 2001], the hosting facilities weren’t on par, but that’s a moot point now.” And then there’s the available software talent. “Loyalty is very high, as is the ability to acquire talent fast. There are pools here that can be tapped without having to go to your competitor,” he says. “As markets expand beyond Seattle, the next natural point might be Portland.”
