You're listening to the identity of the center podcast, this is the show that talks about identity and access management and making sure you know who has access to what let's get started. Welcome to the identity of the center podcast. I'm Jeff. And that's Jim. Hey, Jim. Hey, Jeff, how are you? Oh, not so bad yourself. Hey man, living the dream. Here at the Gartner, I am Summit. Today was awesome.
The keynote this morning, was one of the best that I've seen I mean so it was Matthew lone loon, I think moon I want I don't yeah sorry sorry Master Storyteller yeah so I'm sure he's like a big listener the podcast so if he is sorry about that. But yeah.
I mean, just he talked about how to tell stories, you know, pretty much whatever industry you're in, but little bit of background on him he was, you know, he was like a artist for The Simpsons and then wound up doing, you know, and Orion, creation and animation for Pixar, right? And working for Steve Jobs and what another creative person.
So it is, like the combine creativity, but the Biggest thing for me was like I was just sitting there thinking imagine if you were good enough at communicating that you could be doing what he's doing and doing it as masterfully as he is. And yeah, I wanted to segue with that or at least just kind of mention. So we've got a guest here today, Lewis, Almeida. And this guy is a master
communication, right? He is like, I've just, he has a way of connecting with people emotionally and empathetic And I think that was like, I've seen him succeed so many times and, you know, making customers feel like our clients feel like, you know, they're they're really they're more than customers right there. There's somebody that he cares about he's not going to abandon them, things like that. So anyway I wanted to say that about Louis because I just have
a ton of respect for him. Yeah so man I have to jump in yes that's one of the nicest things I've heard in a long time Jim and it really means a lot to me. You know, for your listeners they might not know. I mean the people that that are here with me today, Jim and Geoff, I consider really good friends. So thank you for saying that, I really appreciate it. Not a dry eye in the house here this is, yeah, it's a good way to kick things off. I didn't you know just to level set. Right.
We're here at the Gardner conference, we're trying to put out a whole bunch of content. We put out something last night, that was kind of day one. Now, we're here today to Jim
are. Our scheduling Guru has booked a variety of great guests, Lewis almeida's are First one, he's with clear sky, he's the chief Revenue officer, which I assume means make a crap ton of money for the company and we're going to talk to that and again we're in the The Suite that has been so graciously donated by the following fine folks at our SM. So thank you very much. RSM why don't we start what?
So the last time you were on the show with us Louise was episode 78 and we talked about digital transformation and that has been one of the themes that really kind of jumped out to me as part of this competition. Hence, as we heard it yesterday, and I noticed this with the Keynotes and we talked about this in an our preview of the Gartner, episode is a lot of the Keynotes are focused on the human part of identity and really, not even identity, but business emotion storytelling,
those sorts of things. And one of the things that came out was digital transformation. Was people get lost in this obtuse phrasing and nomenclature of we're going to digitally transform blah blah blah. It is not doesn't make a lick of sense. When you say it like distilling, that down into something that makes sense is something that is really the articulation of that message, we want to go and it's at Echo, Jim's point and you have we've been on sales.
Calls is all having been former. We were tied entropy and listening to the connections. In the stories has been a big part of think of the success that we had as a group and obviously, you know, individually as well but with that long Preamble in place, I guess, how is your Conference going so far. Are you attending sessions? Are you a booth babe? You know, what are we doing? You know, I've never been so active in the booth. I've been to probably 15 garters and I was famous for never
really showing up at the booth. Yeah, you know, can confirm, you know, my prior employer. We were really at the at the center I'd say like I would say, almost said we were at the General Store of identity, right? Vendors wanted us to partner with them and clients We're of the work that we did, this is really kind of one of the hubs at the Gartner event. So I was always busy.
Alright, today is, you know, I'm with a with a smaller company, that's really, you know, trying to make its Mark and as a result, you know, I'm I was there yesterday morning unboxing things. It's setting up the booth and my suit and has. I was doing that, I couldn't believe I was doing it manual. Labor was doing manual labor, you know, and it felt really good and it's Been a great conference for us, it really has.
And the way I measure that is, you know, the traffic through the expo hall and also the interest that the customers that are attending have and also their knowledge. All right, so always engage the conversations knowledgeable people. They know what IGA is not spending a lot of time, explaining what we do and for those reasons it's really been a good conference for us. What are you noticing about this year compared to Prior because
you've been to 15, that's a lot. I thought a for myself was a lot but 15 is double that I would, I would guess 15. Yeah. So what's different like what's different from this year compared me to Prior years? So you know, I'm sensing a lot. Less hype. Okay. Like I think that you know identity has become a reality. I mean it has been for a long
time, right? But I remember the days where, you know, seal point was to Taking over the world, and it was like this, you know, this Banner out in front and octo was growing, and it was just craziness and I just felt like, you know, the booths were huge and the sense I got this week was that, you know, even the larger vendors downsized their booths like you have major players like broadcom or one identity, you know, in reasonably sized boost.
It's almost as if people have come a little bit to their Is that are making the best use of their marketing dollars. I see attendance up. I think there is a good amount of people. Like, if you saw the Keynotes all of those people, I was shocked at how many people were in the the hall there. So for us extremely positive in that sense because our small Booth didn't, you know, it was able to be seen and lots of great conversations so good
show. Yeah, I know. So your booth how busy you guys were. I also saw some booths where there wasn't much traffic so I think people are coming into the vendor Hall and kind of seeking out who they want to talk to. They're more educated to your point more educated on what they're looking for what they need. They kind of know what I am as I credit that somewhat to I think the pandemic and people having to kind of do some research and not having Forces.
Every year is my impression in past years was people showing up completely green on. What I am was. The other thing I would say though is, you know, and I wanted to get your thoughts on this, is that I think many more like a higher percentage of the audience is coming from. These are I am practitioners working for organizations where they're doing. I am for their organization rather than consultants and vendors.
What are your thoughts on that? Do you feel Like it's a greater percentage right now, we, you know, we did see some sis come through the booth. I didn't see a lot of them. You know, there wasn't this huge presence. I think that they're probably here in off off show a little bit and doing their dinners. I just saw a lot of educated customers and I think the difference this year was if you're here post covid, it's because you really wanted to be here, right? People aren't traveling
gratuitously nowadays. So, the people that came He missed it. They wanted to be here and you know it for us it's like a high school reunions. I mean it's crazy. So there's a social aspect to it and and hooking up with the channel Partners such as yourselves for us that's a tremendous opportunity as well. Yeah I would say also you know it's a big investment especially if you're a company sending 314 members.
I mean you know you have to cost of the passes the cost of the travel as well as like the opportunity cost of not being. Your seat doing your job. But when I think about the benefit of sending people to accomplish sirs, the employee retention aspect. So I'm thinking about it from a company that, you know, does doesn't do. I am for their business, but does I am sending people?
It's an employee retention because people will feel like, hey my company cares about me. They're going to send me and then there's the education aspect. I mean, I've really been coming away from this Gartner conference with A lot of you know, knowledge that I'll be able to put to work and I've been in the industry for 20 years. Yeah, I agree. I'm getting that feedback from people visiting that that
brought non-identity people. There was one customer that said, he brought an audit team and he said some of the sessions were really good for them. In other words, were above their heads were suited for him. So there's a good mix there but you made me think of our friend and that if I trolley of net BR and Brazil. Remember him, he brought eight people. I'm from Sao Paulo to the conference and it's about retention and it's about look at
who we are. Were a player, you know, I think he's one of the largest IGA integrator is in Pam and other things that he does in Brazil and they're celebrating it and they're having a blast and usually I'd be out with them but I can't keep up because of doing manual labor at the booth, which is great too. So this has been a good good change for me and getting your boots back on the ground. Getting connected with the Common Man movies.
That's right. Yeah. Um, so let's talk a little bit about clear sky. I think one of the things that we like to do is kind of talk through some of the different vendors in this space. I know you guys are in IGA, but what is it? That clear sky does that's different than other folks that are in this. Thanks, so, you know, so so Gartner, I like to look at Garden. I think Gardner is a great reference for the market.
People looking at the market, they spent a lot of time researching IGA and, you know, they killed the magic quadrant. And if you talk to Andre Nikki, you know, you'll tell you that the reason they killed it, or the reason Gartner kills quadrants is because the products get commoditized and we see that, you know, in our jobs like, you know, we used to always when we and my former employer that we all work together, you know. I used to say, it's not about
the product, right? It's really about making sure that, you know what, you want to accomplish with the part product, having a good partner and deploying it. And I think that's absolutely the case with IGA. The reason clear sky was attractive to me, is because they're doing, we're doing that on a platform and that platform is service now and before clear skies I thought servicenow was itsm service. Now is not itss so much more so
much more. It's this platform and, you know, I worked at ca for a while, we used to sit CA that the ca products, all had a common bus between them, it was not true. Okay, the products are all Standalone products. The platform is a common bus. So everything that service now puts out puts on that platform is integrated and what we're seeing. Old macdermot, their CEO, who let us say P for a long time. Is really. It is no longer a burden.
It's now the engine that's fueling business and that's really what digital transformation is about. And those guys are leading the way so for us to be able to put IGA on the platform initially I thought it was about a better integration with itsm but it's not what we're doing is we're putting the user information up there. So if you're a company, the views Servicenow strategically, and you've got all of these workloads up there grch are the
SEC Ops products, right? And now you put your users in their entitlements up there. It's almost necessary to have it there. So we've got that privilege, that. That's what we're doing. And so we have, I won't say a better mousetrap, but a different one that for certain companies is very powerful and I think, historically people booked at platforms as A soft. Yeah, OS, Titan level, right Linux, right.
Those sorts of things and do you think people are starting to figure out that there are other platforms like servicenow like Salesforce sap? Even itself, sometimes has its own platform from your traffic and your conversations are people picking up on sort of this paradigm shift that it's not just the OS. Maybe that's running the platform. It's something else. You know, it's very interesting because the early adopters are. So if you were to say A who does see service.
Now that way it's going to be your large Financial organizations rights 08 itsm is everywhere. Like you know, almost every Enterprise has a service now footprint. But it's only the really large organizations that have said this is going to be that platform that manages other platforms. You know, again, I'll point to build McDormand. I've been listening to him a lot. You don't need talks about the hyper scalars, right?
As you're an AWS. Yes. And those other platforms because we don't compete with them. Then we'd also don't compete with your Erp systems for your CRM systems and he sees them is a platform that manages other platforms. I was talking to a gentleman from Accenture in Australia because, you know, as a start-up one of my privileges as I handle Australia, which means I get to work at 8:00 at night, 10:00. At least you get to go there. I'm good to get together.
Yeah, we get to go there. Yep, for sure. Okay, I don't feel so bad then and he To me goes, I see service now is a category killer and what does that mean category? Killer so IGA it has the potential. Maybe not through us but it has the potential to kill the
category, right? If you think about it where and you have to think of this through time as it involves and kills other as it grows and becomes more market, share has more market share in different categories, you're going to have more value, you know, one plus one doesn't equal two equals four and as you put more and more products on that platform, it starts to become best of breed across all of these
different categories. Like, for instance, remember when we integrated X2 Beam with sale Point Ito very clearly. So the so there are security products. Or set up to, as they developed these best-of-breed Solutions on the platform. Everything's integrated. You're feeding a common database basically our graph or, you know, Lake whatever you want to call it, right? All the data is going into a centralized location which makes it available for other services to consume, right?
I mean and I'm shocked by and by what the possibility is there and you know, it's never servicenow guy. The first time I went to service down knowledge of blue My mind, it was like that. Parable of the frog that lived in a well that then left the well and saw the ocean and his mind blew up and I'm like, oh my God, I was just, you know, thousands of people. So it's very interesting what
they're doing. I think they've got the right culture and we're fortunate to be a part of that, we kind of almost stumbled into it because we thought it was just itsm and you know we're learning again which is which is really nice. Like I'm learning a lot about that. Do you hear objections where people say? Say. Oh yeah, we're not going to go service now. It's too expensive. I hear a lot of objections about service now.
You know, it's quite common, and that's why I think we're at best were a fit for certain companies, right? Just like an IGA. How many times have you guys heard? I'm not happy with my Ig a solution. It's like skarner says it's 76% of vendors. Aren't or customers aren't happy with their IGA, why? It's really expectation.
Like, remember you do one of the things we'd always do is Define requirements, and objectives, and make sure for our customers that those were attainable requirements, and objectives, help them sell to their organization, attainable goals, so that they didn't get in trouble. I think was service now. It's very similar, okay? The you can do anything with that product, right? You can workflow anything so you can get carried away.
Yeah man. I have seen this one Trend with customers of a died who have been on the IGA Journey. I've done it right and they get four five six years into it and then they get to the point where it's like, they put so much into the IGA system. Now their managers were getting 100 approval requests today, right? So now they have to figure out. Well, how do we? How do we take care of that issue? Yeah and I think service now, if you don't manage It
appropriately, right? It can, it can be hard to get value out of for some that go beyond just itsm. And I think other organizations within the company, get a little jealous, maybe of the resources that are going there, I hear a lot of people say the servicenow guys. Always think they can solve everything you know. So I think that's true. I mean, look, the Microsoft guys think they can solve everything and no matter what you know when you the only tool you have is a hammer.
Everything looks like a nail. I think is true and I see one thing I wanted to ask you about is you know Gartner has this idea of like IGA light, what are your thoughts on that? I love it. Well, I know what is aij like, I love it. They explain what IG a light is, right? They basically it's came on in this corner capabilities document, IGA capabilities, which substituted for the the magic quadrant. So they break down all the functions, right? You think about role engineering as Saudi?
Entitlements management password reset they break all of that up and they say, look, I GA light are these five things? In that paper, they go on to talk about how people by IGA, in the end up using a think. The number was like 30, but I don't know. That's the best music 30% of what you buy or 26 percent of what you buy. And I go, that's what we've been telling our successful customers all along, you focus on what's important.
Our and what's more important than aggregating user information correlating it and then reporting on who has access to. What I'm always amazed that people that are just starting off there. Like, I want to preserve provision to these 20 apps like mint, just to review. This is right, you're still faxing paper in for a class. Let's let's take a take the training wheels off, first reviews in my mind, that's IG light, okay? And it's Interesting, Jeff.
You know this the more hardcore seasoned identity practitioners, they know this, I get pretty jaded sometimes when I hear vendor messaging and I'm going to pick on AI, every vendor has some sort of AI component. Oh my God, it's like okay and I tell customers on time with that we work with as well, don't get distracted by the shiny thing. Like you need to get the basics, right? AI is not going to do anything for you until you get the basics, right?
Yeah. And if you do it basically you do it in a basic way that That delivers a lot of value like we talked about you do basic roles, you know, and some rules and so those things that you don't really need Ai. And what's really interesting about that is we're starting so I never really said that we were tremendously Innovative people would ask me what's your differentiator? I'd say we do it on service now. So it's our user experience.
You know, it's the platform but I'm starting to see some differentiators because we've opted, not develop some AI stuff, but we like crowdsourcing right. We like the idea of what about you, ask people? What a group does, right? Or you ask people what an account is and you start to build a library of these things that can help Define entitlements. I'll never forget that one account that you and I worked on. I think it's a naval manufacturer that I think, you know, everything about it.
I know you went in and you build the judges, oranges. You built the A very took like a month, and you had the application honor and you had the managers in a room building in entitlements Library, like, what does this entitlement do? So that when you review it, you know what, you're reviewing, the basics, the basic. Now imagine if we did that during a review process, where you go do you certify this axis and you don't have to say yes or no, you can say I don't know what this is. Goes back.
Some But he answers what it is. It comes back at that gets stored and that becomes available to the next person. I don't you don't even have to ask what it is. There's an information thing and now you know what that entitlement is and you can have a whole effort that's workflow driven around building an entitlement Library. Like that's the kind of thing, I think is more cool than a, i, to be honest with you, it's like this live Dynamic data thing, right? That exists.
And it's constantly being updated and enriched and definitions. Can change over time, right? You can call it one thing and then somewhere, someone internally rebrands it and now it's got a different name and you keep it going. It's you know I used to back the days we had Rosa black on here a couple days ago and one of the things that I'm sure she'll remember is we set up a Wiki with all of our documentation and how we did things but it was
constantly changing. So I was always harping on the team. Did you update the wiki if you did not hit the wiki the information didn't exist and it didn't matter. I was see that type of discussion all the time and our engineering team versus our customer success team. Customer success. What something in the product and Engineering is like, did you update? It's not a Wiki, but I hear the same things over there. Yeah. I want to make some observations about the the vendor hog.
Bring it back to that conversation. So you mentioned the booster smaller, I agree the makeup of the vendors, like, where's Oracle? They're not there, right, broadcom, small booth. Anything. Those were the two heaviest hitters of all ten years ago. The other thing I wanted to point out was just, you know, a lot. There are a lot of booths, right? And a lot of companies with smaller booths but they're still there and I think it's this area around.
There are a couple of areas where there's still emerging. So IGA is not really what I would call emerging there is that are emerging are managing access to your Cloud infrastructure. So not Cloud apps, but more your AWS your Google Cloud. Things like that. The other is in the authentication, space around verified Identity or biometric stuff like that. So those are areas that has always been cool to me about I am is there's always something that's emerging.
This pushing the boundaries that could be the next big thing. That didn't, the last point that I wanted to make was something you brought up earlier around, like, remember when we were working on On EXA beam. And like, where's you be? A that was like, the, the storyline of the. That's the next big thing is not only who has access to. What it's, what are they doing with that access? And can we detect anomalies now? It's like, where is that? Where is that conversation? Is it just now?
Baked into products of? There's no need for an exit beam? Or I mean, I remember working closely with executed at the time and I thought, you know what, a great company. They're growing so fast and dynamic and they talked about how users Here analytics was going to be a thing of the past, and I think that that space is evolving very quickly. I did see grew call here, right?
And I think, you know, one of the most impressive presentations, I ever saw was the Seesaw of Aetna talking about how he had integrated Guru call and say V and and, you know, created the stuff that we were trying to create at that and I'd entropy right? And the integration between sale point. And next to me, what did we We learn there though. We learned that there was politics that the person that owned the lake, the data Lake didn't want to interact with the person that owned identity.
And I think what's great about what you're saying about the gardener show here, it's really one of the three pillars of I am. It's either Pam, it's access management or its IGA. That's the bulk of the people that are that are here. And I think that that's really what makes this show special you to like go to. I'm only even RSA, which is so huge, right? But there's no threat guys here and it's refreshing.
I mean, you know, because it's going back to basics, almost it really is. It's a good show. Yeah, I think I think you be a, is something that I was very interested in because I think I'd say under leverage component of an identity program, you've got all this data and nobody does anything with it. It's like, oh, we created a ticket. Cool, what are you doing with that information, right? Are you doing metrics SLA, SIU?
Looking for anomalies etcetera. And I think you'd be a was supposed to be the solve that would fix that for you. And now we've got this space called itd our identity threat detection response which is like this which to me sounds like you be a it's just a different acronym. For essentially, the same or similar capabilities. We showed our solution working with some security products that
service now has. And one of the Cecil's, they have several ceases one of the cisos that's On the financial vertical for servicenow goes, I need to show you this product to our threat Hunters. You know, honestly I'm not a security guy so I don't even know exactly what he loved about it. But that's the potential of the platform because those things are all their naturally integrated and you could, you could do things that otherwise
would require an integration and the platform is breaking down those political barriers, right? Because before you They just didn't want to work together. And I think if those things go to a service now, like platform those walls get broken down to a degree. Yeah, I mean I think that's one thing that becomes difficult is you're trying to do ticketing within your IGA platform. But you are Network people, your application people do their ticketing in service.
Now, there's a disconnect. So at the very minimum, I know we started the conversation off serves now, it's not just about ticketing, but people don't want to have to go to switch to do from tools to do essentially the same thing. Pulling it all together to me is you know where things have to head and I guarantee you, there's tons of people out there going through snow away and putting IJ on on, on service down. We got it. All right. I mean you want to control what
you're doing, you're familiar. There's a lot of Investments and in that sense you two were also taking it approached. You know, don't don't change what you're doing, how about we connect in to your IG, a solution and pull that data up onto the platform. Mr. Identity guy. You might not need have a need for that, but maybe your auditor
that's running servicenow. GRC does, or maybe your HR team, does that wants to manage non employee records of wants to do some vendor stuff, so just open up your platform. It's okay, it's not gonna hurt and we'll pull that up on the service. Now, in the service down team can do what it will with it, you know, to the other approach,
interesting. It's an interesting idea of leveraging, essentially, to IGA products within the environment to act A bridge between platforms because you might have said, okay, well, sail point is our platform for identity, okay, cool. Or OCTA, right? Or whatever. Maybe, but you might still have service now and what are you doing to enrich that data? And most people have till Point, OCTA is your and all of these
things, right? And the question then becomes the servicenow Strategic enough that you would have used for this user data. And if you have used to this user data, you guys know we could Connect into that Target system, it's just a Target system. And the beauty of it is, if I connect into one target system and it happens to be a TIG a platform. What's that connected to all the other apps Downstream, right?
So, it could be like a universal adapter to get those identities in the environment, some sort of like Bridge identity identity before. Yeah fabric. It's getting all right. I want to be cognizant of time because we certainly wax poetic here around a few different things. I'm going to go completely left field, here does Bigfoot exists, you know? I've known to be a bit of a conspiracy theory.
Notice he didn't say no right away, way out there and I came across this YouTube channel and I highly recommend it to fall asleep. It's called The Sasquatch Chronicles. This gentleman has 750 plus episodes where he interviews people that claim to have seen Sasquatch or Bigfoot or Kate, if you listen to what was the last one come Cape, so I had no idea what is that? So, it's Bigfoot in Florida. Okay, I live in Miami as you guys don't like, right on the right, like Big Cypress, the
Everglades, right? Apparently, there's Bigfoot in Florida. I, okay. So this is, this is breaking near that Bigfoot was in Alaska, everywhere. They have, they have, they have signings all across the Appalachians down into Florida and the South and listen, I'm not saying Bigfoot, This which I'm not because I think you did, but the people that do think he exists or she exists it something. Yeah. Listen to their reaction,
interesting. I think it would be hard for you to fake the amount of fear that these people have when they're describing those. Sightings so Sasquatch Chronicles, check it out, it's worth it. Interesting. So there's apparently there's a big feet if there's multiple sightings or very, very traveled Bigfoot, what do you think? Jim, I think so. Like you're crazy I don't leave no yeah especially I don't know.
You know it's going to say well maybe I don't know like in the last curve something and we mentioned Florida's Lehigh don't think so God kpi, check it out. Listen to a couple of those people telling their stories, you tell me what you think. Yeah. You know and the other thing is you could take that and turn it into a show on the History Channel. So maybe that's what the guys trying to do is like build a case.
Hey, we have History Channel. Show you already have one on Ancient Aliens which That shows like totally. So I would say that Bigfoot to me is like the perfect IGA program. It might be out there. Ever knows it. That Louise, kind of remind you of the one guy from Ancient Aliens. He's like the main with the hair here are the greatest gerseg. I'm not saying it's aliens. It's identity at the center to get hard hitting news and information. Joseph like people stop identity, its Center.
Five minutes before the show ends. And by the way, before we end, I just want to congratulate you guys on the success of the podcast. I know you guys have a lot of listeners out there really happy for you guys. I know you guys have a new gig, though. Wish, you guys all the best, I really do. Okay, now, let's see how we can help the IGA space together. That's so nice. I think you know we're all family now at this point. So that's very cool. All right, let's go.
Go ahead and wrap it up for this episode. Again, we're here at Gartner talking with different folks. Thanks again to our SM, for the sweet sweet. As Jim likes to say and you can find us online identity center.com, Twitter, idac podcasts. Clear sky has a website, clear CL, EA, R SK, y e because the waii because we like Scotch because it's a guy that's a guy clear skies. Love you. Yeah. All right. We'll go ahead and leave it to this week. Thank you so much for being here.
Louise. Good friend of the program and in real life, which is cool. So, we'll go ahead and stop it there. Thanks everyone for listening, and we'll talk with you all in the next one. Thanks for listening to the identity at the center podcast. If you like what you heard, don't forget to subscribe and visit us on the web and identity at the center.com.