This is identity at the center. If it has anything to do with IAM, this is the go to podcast now your hosts Jim McDonald and Jeff Stedman. Welcome to the Identity at the Center podcast. I'm Jeff and that's Jim. Hey, Jim. Hey, Jeff, how are you? Oh, not so bad yourself. Good. It's been an interesting week so far. And then we're early in the week. You and I have been working on the business of a nonprofit. And I remember we were talking about, OK, how do we set this up
and said nonprofit. Yeah, that sounds easy. Let's do that. But I mean, if you think about it, I mean five, almost five years ago, so our unofficial 5 year anniversary is July 2nd, right? That was when we launched our first episode of the podcast that was truly pirate radio and we operated for a couple years just producing podcasts. And then we said, look, we want to do some more things, bring some more content to our listeners, and we want to go to conferences like EIC.
And none of that stuff is cheap. I mean, just running a podcast of high quality is not cheap. And so here we are, right? We have the nonprofit organization to set up to cover a lot of that. And it's it's a lot of work. It is. It has consumed my life I think since December. I usually take the last couple weeks off of December to kind of like recharge and going to get ready. And I spent that entire time getting trying to get things off the ground.
I really wish there was a like, here's some, here's, here's a plea, right, for somebody out there like make an easy button for this. Like, hey, I want to start this and if you have a service that like helps do nonprofit in a box, reach out to me because I I would definitely consume that service. But it is a lot of work.
Well, the other the other big effort now is we're putting more attention on our YouTube. And so I've been going out and watching like, how do you grow your YouTube channel? How do you make better videos? What's the key in here? OK, it's thumbnails and it's this, but really it's the things that we've been doing, focusing on the niche, which ours is digital identity and being consistent. So we publish an episode every Monday and then a lot of weeks.
It's more than that. So I think we're doing the right things now. It's, it's tweaking. But there are also like, OK, well here's you know, you can go from what we have now like 250 subscribers to thousands. You can have 100,000 subscribers if you got the credit card you're willing to swipe. And I I propose a resolution that we never do that because I don't think that's what we're all about. I just want to have a a organically grown YouTube channel just like we did with
the podcast. But I also would say that I'm not against like asking folks who listen like go out and subscribe to our YouTube. This is a shameless plug. Subscribe right is. That I don't mind. I don't mind doing the shameless plug. I just don't want to swipe the credit card. That that does not surprise me based on expense reports that I've been looking at. Yeah, I don't. I don't really enjoy spending money aimlessly.
No, I don't think anybody does. But yes, doing more on the YouTube channel, go like subscribe to all that fun stuff took us a while to build up the audio here. We are now trying to build the video. So we'll see how it goes. But you know we are, we are a niche podcast. I think we're just helpful. It's Identity access management, but we are worldwide, we have listeners 10s of thousands around the world at this point.
And I forget the last count, but I think we were heard in just about every country in the world, including North Korea, which I find really interesting. Yeah, we've got one listener there, I think, Kim. Jong is a IS. Listening, the Supreme Ruler has somebody in in some office like making sure that we don't talk negatively about his country and and we won't if if you help us grow the subscriber piece there. If you subscribe, we we turn a blind eye to issues like that.
Is that what you're saying, Jim? I hope. Not, yeah, no. It has some integrity. Well, you always finish the shows by saying share it with a friend, share it with an enemy, we don't care as long as you share it. But also in this, in this day and age of where we're doing more video, if you look behind me, if you're listening to audio, you probably, you obviously can't see it. But I only have one diploma on
the wall. Now I'm going to put the other one under it and then I'm going to take our Identiverse banner from last year and put it there. And I mean the biggest thing was this identiverse banner. It was really cool, you know, having a room and Identiverse last year. We're going to have spaces this year to do it again. But that placard, you know, I valued us so much. I carried it home all the way from Vegas, back through Atlanta into Augusta, GA. On foot? In the snow? Uphill both ways?
No, but. I was on that tram in Atlanta, which you know, like how many people get on that tram and don't hold onto a pole or onto something. And then it comes to the hard stop and they fall all over. Happens every single time. And like, I'm guarding this thing with my life to make sure that people fall into the the Styrofoam placard. Well, it's like, you know, we'll we'll keep collecting those like Thanos collecting Infinity Gems.
Since we're going to be at Identiverse later this year, I think we'll have some signings there too. So hopefully you'll be able to get another one home. Let's just start building like you know your background, just be all conference identiverse or you know conference identity at the center type type stuff behind. You. My entire home. My entire home. On the outside, yeah, speaking
Identiverse, we are going to be there. 2024 is coming up and we've got a discount code for folks so time is running short I think. I'm not sure if early bird discount. It's really not early bird at this point since we're less than a month away. But if you're a a late attendee you can use the code IDV 2 four Dash IDAC 25 and then I'll get you 25% off of your registration. We'll have a link in our show notes because I know that's really easy to remember.
But if you just check the show notes for us, or if you're watching on YouTube, I'll have it in the, you know, the thing below. You'll be able to to grab it from there. But that is coming up May 28th to the 31st. Jim, you and I will be in Vegas. We'll be podcasting and I'll be moderating a panel with our friends Sean and Atul and others, and just generally gallivanting around town. As the Upright Gentleman Podcast too, we're going to be recording podcasts and there's going to be
live listen options. We have two locations we're going to be podcasting from. So I guess we haven't really talked about how we're going to, where we're going to publish
those schedules. But I'm thinking on our website, idacpodcast.com, we can schedule, you know, put out the schedule so people can either sit in the room with us or there's another one, which I've been calling the fishbowl because it's a room with like, glass walls and they're putting headphones outside of that fishbowl that people can listen to the conversation that's happening inside. You know what? I just.
Created more work for me to update the website with a new schedule and a new apparently a new page and keeping it updated in case things change throughout the week, which they will. So thank you for that. How about you do it on LinkedIn or Twitter or something like that instead? I'm well, I'll definitely do that. Definitely. I'll commit to doing that. But here's the thought I was having is we're going to be in this fishbowl with the headphones. Is there going to be some Sandy wipes?
Sanitary wipes to? Because I don't want to put headphones on that may have been used by several people before me. Sorry, I just. I don't want to. That's why I bring my own monitors, so I'll just use those. OK, well everyone else will have to use use those, so. Yeah, the filthy unwashed peasants around us watching. Yeah, that's not the only conference we have coming up,
right. We've got the a discount code for folks who are going to be going right to the European identity and Cloud conference EIC in Berlin which is the week after I dinner versus June 4th through 7th in Berlin. Discount code is EIC 24, IDAC 25 gets you 25% off. The link will be in the in the show notes. Or you can go to Cooper Coal dot com and navigate your way there, but the discount code will work the same either way.
And then Identity Week. We'll be at the Identity Week America in Washington DC September 11th and 12th. There's also one in Europe June 11th through 12th in Amsterdam and Asia. Identity Week Asia is in Singapore October 22nd and 23rd. Discount code IDAC 30 which will give you 30% off. It's a nice round Number. You're getting better at reading these off this is. I'm getting better. It's getting better.
The first time I tried it was like reading it word for word and I was like never doing that again. I'm trying to read off like a a super long URL. That's a real bad idea. My favorite is when you gave the wrong code for the wrong conference and I was just sitting here like Nope, Nope, that's not right. Hey, you always said we can call time out and we can. Yeah, we can always do it now. We'll do it live.
We'll figure it out. What else do we want to talk about before we introduce our guest? Well, I think we should introduce our guest because we've been going for quite a while now. Yeah, let's get to it. Patrick Harding, he's a Chief product architect at Ping Identity. Welcome to Identity at the center, Patrick. Thank you guys. Appreciate it. Yeah. Thanks for taking the time. Let's start with a little bit about your background. How did you get into the IAM industry?
Is it something that you chose or did it choose you? A little bit of both. I used to be way back in the day, a enterprise security architect at Fidelity Investments in Boston, and I was doing security pen testing, firewalls, things like that, you know, back actually before it was called cyber. So we're going to talk today a little bit about artificial intelligence. I know it's kind of a fad. It's probably not going to stick around for a while, but I'd like to talk about it a little more
detail. One of the things that I find interesting is the definition of AI because I feel like my definition has changed, you know, within the last couple years with you know large language models and and things like that where it was. It's not just kind of behind the scenes right now we're using to generate, generate things generative AI. We want to talk about, hey, how AI is impacting identity space. But before we get there, how do
you define AI today? Sure. So I think you know we've been sort of doing and talking about gene learning and I suppose many people might have called that or would have called that AI. But I think the term AI now is more associated with generative AI or Gen. AI. We're thinking about the use of generative AI, you know, basically. Jim, how does your definition of AI stand today? It's evolving. You know I thought you said to Patrick was a degenerate AI and I was like, oh, that's something
I could get behind. That actually reminded me of the presentation that Andre Durant did last year at identiversity kind of showed the the bad side of AI. Well, how it could be used as a weapon and I thought that's a good term degenerate AI. But you know, I here's my, my hold up with AI really is that I feel like it has the potential to be a misused term where it's like, you know, tied laundry soap. Now with AI you throw it around too much then what does it really mean?
But I think you know Patrick let us down the right path error, you know thinking of it around this generative AI more than just hey, we we can do business intelligence with large data sets because I think that's not really what AI was all about is around using natural language and a system being able to interpret that into something it can work with, right.
And then I love the iterative capability with the language models, large language models as they call it, where you can keep ask refining questions and either zooming in or or leaning back to get the right answer what you're really looking for.
But I also do think what one of the things for me that that that still surprised me about AI is that you could ask you something like a math question and it can get it absolutely wrong and you know it's wrong, right, because it's like not even close to what you were expecting. And then you ask it, Are you sure about that? Oh, sorry, I made a mistake. And then we're going to fix the problem. And what other computer technology do you know that does
stuff like that? It's almost like degenerate AI. So there's another use for that term. I mean one of the other ways to think about it is that you know with Gen. AI, we're now talking about stuff that can pass the Turing test. And prior to prior to that I said I I think when we talked about machine learning, that wasn't the case. And you know now when you're interacting something and it's human like, it's actually quite exciting to be honest. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's really cool.
This is finally like a technology you could see putting inside a robot and now it's like more humanizing of the whole experience. But one of the things you said yesterday, Patrick, as we were talking through and preparing for this call, was AI is going to be everywhere. And I was wondering if you could explain to us what you meant by that. Sure. So I I just think that AI is going to emerge in you know all products and services that we end up you know leveraging.
I think it's going to actually be fairly quickly adopted whether you know, whether it's into, you know things we, you know things, we drive the services, we're interacting with the, you know, everything. Yeah. And part of everything is how it's affecting the digital identity industry. I was wondering if you could expand a little bit on how you see AI fitting into the
industry, the good and the bad. So the conversations we've had and turned that into the keynote, funnily enough, really from from an identity standpoint, the way we've been thinking about it, it sort of breaks down into two areas. One is to improve our products and identity capabilities in general, both for administrators and end users. Also, it's how AI can be used for bad like dark AI, dark side of AI. And that's really, you know the
realm of how AI can be used. Everybody knows and understands deep fakes, things like that. But also how AI can be used to perform other fraud. You know, whether it's automating the generation of phishing emails, using information that the AI can go and collect off the dark web, or or just off the web in general in ways you can't imagine. No longer are you going to see emails from Nigerian fraudsters. Basically that misspells words and stuff like that.
So again I see it both the good but going to be used for fraud too. Yeah, I mean, you're seeing that already, right? The phishing emails are becoming less obvious. Let's say that it's I I always like, shake my head. Like the attacks are still
social engineering and phishing. They're still one and two, and I kind of feel like, you know, on the social engineering side, the use of video and voice over, you know, that seems to be probably the most dangerous combination when it comes to AI for bad. An employee in Hong Kong was joined on Zoom by a deep fake video of their CFO and was basically talked into moving $25 million do a you know, fraudulent account basically.
So it's extremely real and a survey I think that were released today or imminently where you know over 50% of the respondents are very concerned about deep fakes right now. And so it's it's a very top of mind issue across the across the lobe right now. So we definitely have to get on top of this. Yeah, absolutely. And Jeff, I mean are there, do you have any thoughts in this area about where you're seeing AI for either good or evil?
Well, the, you know, the the best example was our show opener for April 1st where I took AI voices and turned that into sort of how we open up the show. But sure, it's like anything else, right? AI is a tool. It will be used for good. It will be used for bad. Patrick, you mentioned the Hong Kong scenario. I mean 25 million or whatever. It was out the door because of a
very heavily invested attack. That's not cheap to do to get like a bunch of people deep faked on a team's call and then, you know, have to target essentially one person. That seems to me like that was pretty targeted. I know what they wanted to do there. That took a lot of investment. But I mean A is everywhere now at this point. It's helping us write emails, It is helping us configure our security tools.
It is, you know, cleaning up voices and now people are starting to use it to generate videos. So I'm still a glass half full person when it comes to it, but I think we do need to be careful about how it's used and to be able to identify the provenance of how some of these things are coming along. You know, is this really Jeff talking on the screen, you know, and what you're hearing or is it AI, How, how do you confirm that? Is there a way to kind of, you know, make make that
authenticity known? So I you're landing in that in that area, I I completely agree Jeff. It's just going to be a constant cat and mouse game like it has been in security for, you know, 20 years. What we're going to actually, I think, have to actually change the way that we think about using certain channels of communication. Traditionally we've had this implicit trust where the voice I'm listening to, I recognize therefore it must be Jeff or it must be Andre.
The face or the the face I see on the screen looks like Andre. So it's Andre. Basically. We're going to have to start to get used to I think looking to establish explicit trust but but doing it out of band. So actually you know if I'm on a a voice call with Andre sending me something out of band to say hey it's me Andre, I'm like that we're seeing it a little bit in in in sort of that to me is like
peer-to-peer interactions. We're seeing it a little bit more in sort of business to consumer interactions to a certain extent where you know even though I'm talking to the bank, the bank still needs to confirm it's me. So they might ask me for a voice authentication for some sort of other transaction. They might basically ask me for
a PIN. Yeah I think there's there's a lot of good points and you think about the approach you just talked about there reminds me of multi factor authentication. You know it's multi factor and and realistically just like with social engineering, just like with phishing, none of the safeguards we put in place are going to be catch alls unless people are skeptical enough to ask themselves a question. Really. Should I click on the link and type in my credentials and give this information?
Should I do secondary checks? Should I be skeptical and just think a little bit of skepticism before sending 25 million even though at all the people on the phone? How about a text message to one of the people you know? How about a a follow up phone call?
I don't think it, it doesn't necessarily need to be all the time, but it's recognizing on certain certain interactions transactions, requests that maybe that's worthy of an outbound thing and exchange essentially to to confirm and it's that confirmation step that I think it's important but it's difficult. I mean it's it's going to we're going to have to retrain people to not. No, we don't. We tried to train people not to
trust every e-mail they see. We're going to have to, you know train people not to trust every phone call, every video call, stuff like that they see too. So that's again, it's going to be challenging, which is why we need to set up sort of established processes where people get used to the notion of, you know, confirming out of band that they're interacting with certain people and stuff like that. It it's going to have to become second nature to them, otherwise
they'll forget. Let's talk about AI governance because they, you know, I feel like the first time this topic came up was really around things like ChatGPT becoming available on the Internet and folks like us kind of discovering them and being able to start to query information. Then you start to think about, well, everything we're feeding into this becomes part of the model, right?
And if we start putting proprietary information either on purpose or by accident proprietary information, it becomes part of the model. And so you know that's where I first kind of became aware of where companies need to put together some kind of governance, some kind of policy. But I also see now AI is much bigger than just ChatGPT. It's we're implementing products that have AI kind of baked into
them. We are maybe building products that have AI built into them, maybe our end products that we sell to consumers have AI. So given all that, where do you see the AI governance, what's important and who are kind of the the folks that need to be involved when you think about a corporation? We ended up realizing that we already have data governance like policies in place. So we added some AI governance and then got everybody to sort of re sign the data governance policies.
That's grown a little bit because it's it's expanded beyond chat. GPT now where we've asked people to basically let us know, are you looking what other services are you looking at using to understand what their terms and conditions look like the how they leverage you know the data that we provide and share with them. So again we, you know again we're being very cautious and careful there. We definitely want to use Gen. AI with confidential data, not PII but confidential data.
And in that case we're you know we're looking at just using services like Open AI sort of enterprise capability where they isolate the use of that data just to a model that's under under sort of our control. So there's no leakage of that information into other areas. So we're being very, very cautious there. Obviously we can take it a step further and say look we're not comfortable with any of that.
We're just going to run the open source models ourselves and that's something else we'll we're we're evaluating too. Is that realistic? I mean, in your mind, because I I kind of expected the answer you just gave there, which is that say you're building an identity management solution, leveraging one of the big AI tech platforms for your AI engine and then kind of carving out some kind of tenant if you
will, for lack of a better term. But is it realistic to think that a company that specializes in one area of technology that's not AI could build enough robust AI? Or you're only looking at that because that's potentially the only solution. When you're talking about the use of say open A, let's say the GPT 4 APIs for example, they're they're not, I mean they're they're slow.
They respond very, very slowly today, obviously likely that will improve over time, but they they don't respond very quickly. That's OK if we're talking about you know, sort of natural language processing queries and stuff like that where people are comfortable you know waiting for that response to come back.
But for other real time use where we're talking about needing to get responses back in, you know milliseconds, that's where we might need to evaluate the use of models that might have been trained by the bigger models like the the, the larger LLMS. But but you know where we're running them locally ourselves and again these things don't actually have to be very big but they can respond faster and they
become the. The way I think about it is, you know I say ChatGPT, it is a is a an encyclopedia of knowledge. It has vast knowledge of across lots and lots of things. But you can start to think about trading models with far more localized knowledge that might be very, very specific but very good to certain tasks and you ask them to become experts in something much narrower. Therefore they can respond much
quicker. And that and and being an expert in something very narrower, maybe we can use an open source model to do that and and run it locally ourselves. Yeah, it yeah. So open source model makes sense. I guess what I'm it's interesting going back to when Jeff asked me what's my definition of AI? And I don't think it gave great answers. Like I know it when I see it and I know when it's fake AI. Like fake AI to me is like, hey, did you know that 80% of the people who are like Jeff Sedman
also have this, this role? And why don't you just give that role to Jeff Stedman that's not AI. Because then if I say, well, what if I give Jeff Stedman the role, then what's going to happen is sorry, that input is invalid. Like you've totally lost credibility with me. And that's to me like the state of of AI in identity products that I see. There are other ways to think about how AI might be used in in
identity. And for example if you have a set of prisation policies that are applicable to a certain regulation and that regulation gets updated, you could ask the AI to, you know, reread that regulation and make the suggestions on how the authorization policies get to
change. Basic dated regulatory framework it sees and therefore you start to basically just provide you know it. It eliminates a lot of the human work and allows you to basically, you know, get to, yeah, get to get get to meet the requirements and to compliance more quickly in those situations.
So I I think it's very good at looking at these data sets, whether it's you know, regulatory frameworks, security policies, things like that, analyzing it and making recommendations much like a business analyst might do who has been asked to actually learn and understand these things as
well. I think this whole topic of the idea of like so for me and here would be a great example of what an AI could do. If I could say, hey, tell me all the people who can place orders on this system and it's like OK, I don't know. And then you start asking you a follow up questions or maybe giving you a follow up information to define what roles can place orders on this
systems. Now I can tell you, OK, yeah, these people have these roles and then you could say, all right, well, you know what else is included in those roles? Like you can start actually getting meaningful information by having a conversation like with AAI interface. Now here's where I was going with the walls need to be defined. What if I were to say I'm used ping for an example since that that's your company? What if I were to say OK how many of my users have multi
factor authentication? Says 80%, how does that compare to other ping customers? Now if it said 75% have 80% or more of their users with that, I don't think that violates any kind of non confidentiality that you would have with your other customers, at least for my money. But if I were to say, hey, I know that corporation XYZ is on Ping and I said how many corporation XYZ users use multi factor authentication Were giving you the answer that would
not be good. So there's not only just my opinion or not only like Ping's tenant, but it would be each customer has. You'd have to have some data segmentation within those customers and the AI would have to be smart enough to basically apply rules to make sure that if you were going to have any kind of like cross customer information that it would be generic enough not to be revealing anything that's proprietary to those customers. That's that's what I wanted to throw out there.
I actually agree with you. I think that's a great example. Asking for that in terms context of like, you know, locally it's, you know, my organization. But how does that compare to other organizations? Is completely reasonable use of the tech, the notion of having an assistant for access certifications or access reviews or an access review on someone
to be able to query. All right, when you know, when was this person granted that access in, in what's in who granted it, what was the, you know, what was the rationalization for it? How much have, how much have they used it in this period of time? Being able to sort of query and ask for, ask me for that information to very quickly be able to reach a decision I think
would have huge utility. Actually, we're talking about being able just to ask natural language queries that can be parsed and actually turned into, you know, real, real questions you ask of the system. It becomes very much more of a interface that people can be comfortable with. Just, you know, asking for asking for information is going to help them make decisions in certain ways. What do you see as a is destiny when it comes to the identity
and access management space? And then what do you think is going to hold it back from achieving that destiny? One of the things that we've been thinking about here a little bit is recognizing that AI Gen. AI is a little different to some of the other core capabilities we've been relying on to deliver identity services. Things like you know compute and storage and CPUI think it's going to look very different in 18 months and very different
again in three years. So it it it's really like a little we're sort of like moving in a little bit to the unknown because we haven't necessarily thought about the art of the possible here based on where Gen.
AI might be in 18 months. So, you know, realistically, could we be talking about authentication and authorization services that really can just be queried and they recognize who you are and are able to essentially return a authorization decision based on who you are in the context of what you're going to try and do without necessarily having to write any rules? All right.
Can the Gen. AI be as smart as what a security admin might be if you was to be given that query or the person writing the security policies or the business analytics for the business application. Could the AI be smart enough to be able to respond here in real time? And the other thing is we talk about the identity infrastructure sort of being Gen. AI based.
What does it look like for a bank Ledger to now be basically you know based on a Gen. AI that's the bank Ledger or ACRM application interacting with an identity infrastructure. So it it completely reshapes the way we think about I think how applications are actually going to interact with each other. The AI is become, they evolve, they become even smarter and they become faster at responding stuff like that.
I I'm very concerned about them becoming self learning, like recursive self learning where they become smarter on their own sort of thing because that's you know what was it war games circa 1985 that like that movie or something like that. How, how does this evolve and how do we put some checks and balances in place basically as well. So again I I think this is going to happen over the next few
years. What you know I I think the second-half of this, what's going to hold it back, I I think it is going to be people's natural aversion to significant change. And you know, it's a little like the late 2000s, early twenty 10s where a lot of, you know, generally a lot of smaller businesses that were less risk averse were willing to adopt the cloud because they saw the cost
benefit of doing that. And over time as the cloud infrastructure basically, you know, they put more security around it, you know, more regularly, you know, regulation around it and they got comfortable with it. You started to see larger enterprises taking advantage of it. I could see similar things of all these here in Gen. AI as well. I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you the question.
I'm sure that's on everybody's mind is that, you know, paying Identity and Ford Rock came together to create this super company, super identity company. And with everything that's going on with AI as a little thing that's happening in the background, what does the product road map look like? Is it a merger of these two platforms? Is it they each have their own road map? How? How's it going to work in the
future? Ping and Ford Rock had sort of a common base sort of actor between our products. We can you know both be innovating. So the core access management functionality we have, we're basically continuing to support that across our customer base, whether you're on the Four Drop, original 4 Drop platform or whether you're on the original Ping platform, sort of Ping Federate or you know Access Manager, those will continue to evolve and we'll invest in those going forward.
So they're not going anywhere. We also had tenant cloud infrastructure that Four Drop had built out that we are continuing to support as well as on the Ping side. And then Ping had basically invested in our Ping One multi tenant SAS platform that we're continuing to invest in. So now that it's changing all of that is, is, is, is continuing
forward. On the Ping side, we've been innovating more in the area of threat protection, identity verification, whereas on the Ford Rock side, they'd be more innovating in areas of identity management, life cycle management, those areas. So we now basically bring all of that stuff together and I I think we've got actually a pretty exciting and fairly broad platform that we can actually talk to people about. Right now.
Yeah, I agree. I mean, from my standpoint, these were two really good products and each had their own strengths and some overlap. But you know, each of them were
showing their own areas. I can't speak for your customers, but if I were to try, I would say exactly what you said, which is don't repeat what Oracle did because I was there for that and you know I there were I I don't want to get myself in trouble by by saying what I really think, but I'm going to say don't repeat what they did and I'm sure you can get plenty of perspective on what that was.
Ping sort of took an approach where we wanted to be very we we're sort of expecting it. Was IT driven, Admin driven? We need it to be fairly easy to use and configure essentially with the approach, whereas we want to make it very flexible, very easy for developers to interact and use it so they can get comfortable. Now obviously there's overlap here. This isn't the perfect distinction. It's like kind of like a van.
But that's still why I I'm sort of comfortable that we have the right tool no matter what situation that is. Yeah. It's kind of a lot like the the distinction you made there of IT driven versus developer driven reminds me a lot of the Octa Auth 0 combination Octa, IT driven, all 0 developer driven, a lot of similarities.
And obviously, a lot of their customers were kind of upset that we didn't have something sooner, but we were sort of, you know, trapped a little bit because we actually couldn't talk to Ford Rock until we actually had permission, you know, after the Justice Department approved it. So we sort of had a standing start to actually make that happen. But yeah, I think it's actually turned out well. I culturally the the Ford Rock and team teams are very, very similar culturally.
So that it it hasn't been an issue in terms of bringing these, you know, everybody together and sort of now you know working as one team. I've always been impressed by the the the the the talent and the work at at at Ford Rock. I've known a number of them for a long time. So it's actually quite fun out of you working with a bunch of these guys too. Guys and gals too, actually. So it's great. It's never a dull moment in the identity business. And this is what I like to say.
This is exciting when you see like companies come together like that and and see what turns out of it. But I think we'll probably leave it there, Patrick, because I know you're a very busy guy, but we definitely want to end a lighter note. I want to ask you a golf question because I know you play golf. If you could play a round of golf with any historical figure, who would it be and why? So I had to spend a little time
thinking about that. So one of my heroes as a kid watching golf was a guy called Greg Norman who's kind of like a kind of got a little bit of a issue going on right now with live golf. But back in the day he was pretty good and he he, he obviously had some challenges and ups and downs and stuff like that. But I it would be fascinating to be able to spend some time with him, just, you know, learning about what his experiences were like, the challenges he faced back in the day.
So that'll probably be the guy I I'd be most interested in playing with, I think called a hero of mine. So that's kind of why. It's interesting you selected another golfer, which I think is kind of cool. Jim, How about yourself? Who would you pick to play around in golf with? It's great that you said that because I was thinking the same thing because I picked a a person who I'm pretty sure could beat in golf.
But it's probably my favorite historical character, which is Abraham Lincoln. I mean if you obviously all the things he did, but also the the things he said, you've realized this person was operating at like a genius level intelligence. But I also think I could wolf them pretty good in golf, because golf wasn't even the concept back in the 1860s. So but we'd have a good time together. Maybe enjoy a few beers during the during the rounds as well. What about you, Jeff?
Let's see, I would I'm, I'm going to go back to Leonardo da Vinci only because I want to see where the human race would be with some of the concepts that we're bringing from golf with like dynamics and physics and things like that. And just see how much, how, how how further along could we've accelerated human, human beings with that knowledge shifted forward, you know, a few 100 years. That's the way that I would look at it. I think that's probably a good spot where we'll be at for this
week. Patrick, thank you so much for spending time with us today and looking forward to conversations. Hopefully we'll see you at an upcoming conference. Jim, as always, a pleasure. You can visit us on the web, IDC, podcast.com and go to our YouTube channel. It's really easy to find, just type at IDAC podcast into the search at the top and our YouTube channel will pop right at the top.
But like subscribe to all that fun social media stuff that helps us grow the channel and grow the show and get great guests like Patrick. So we'll have links in our show notes for people to connect with Patrick. Going more about Ping as well as all of the discount codes that we talked about early on in the show. So it'll be all there in a nice neat little package for people to check that afterwards. So with that, we'll go ahead and
leave it for this week. Thanks everyone for listening and we'll talk with everyone in the next one. You've been listening to Identity at the Center. We hope you've enjoyed the show. Make sure to like, rate and review and we'll be back soon. But in the meantime, hit the website at identity@thecenter.com and find us on Twitter at IDAC Podcast. See you next time on Identity at the Center.