History of the Human Brothers Company
Human Brothers has been active since 1985. The company was founded under the name of BRADB Produkter, where the BR was for “brothers” and ADB was the Swedish term then used for what later became IT.
The “brothers”, Krister and Göran Fransson was determined to make use of the new technology in new ways. During the 90’s, the new technology was e-mail. As 50% founders of TenFour Sweden in 1991, they gave birth to TFS Gateway, a product that connected 13 000 companies local email systems to the new email system hosted on the Internet.
In 2000, the focus shifted from then “main stream email” to emerging technologies around Identity and Access Management. Göran was recruited by RSA Security as VP of Engineering for their European software development teams. RSA had acquired a Swedish company, Dynasoft, to advance its PKI capabilities, but the core of the company was really authorization of Unix and Linux servers.
In 2000, Krister headed up a spin out of a product company, TFS Technology, for the product TFS Gateway. TenFour continued as a consultancy organization, until it was acquired in 2004.
In 2002, RSA decided to divest the business they had once acquired. Göran and Krister offered through TFS Technology to acquire the technology and take over the responsibility of customers and employees. As of July 1, 2002, TFS Technology grew from 15 to 115 employees. TFS Technology was able to renew the contracts with basically all existing customers that included Swedish Police, Swedish IRS and many of the biggest banks in the world, such as JP Morgan Chase/Bank One, Citi and Wachovia.
The Head Quarter of TFS Technology was moved to Palo Alto, and a new management team was hired. Krister and Göran stepped out of the operation in 2006, and decided to focus on the human factor of security. They took upon the challenge to build secure information systems that would not require a computer science degree to operate or use. This is when BRADB Produkter was renamed to Human Brothers.
Since 2006, Human Brothers has developed and operated a number of web sites. Göran and Krister has also acted as advisors and representatives for businesses.
Since 2013, Krister has acted as CEO for the Nordic entities owned by an Italian IAM system integrator, Cybertech (previously Omnitech, now part of Engineering). Krister is also involved in Cybertech’s initiatives outside of the Nordics. Göran supported their efforts up until the end of 2015.
At the end of 2015, Göran was approached by the leader (according to Forrester and Gartner) in IAM, Okta. Up until now, Göran assisted the organization to gain partners, customers and a distributor. As of July 1, 2019, Human Brothers will continue to support these organizations, but as an independent advisors and system integrator.
This blog post is summarising the past, future blog posts will update the story as we continue our so far 35 year journey.
