Welcome to the KuppingerCole Analyst Chat. I'm your host. My name is Matthias Reinwarth. I'm an Analyst and I'm an Advisor with KuppingerCole Analysts. We had some very special episodes in the recent months, but this is the most special one. I'm with, 10 years with KuppingerCole right now. So it's just, yeah, 10 years. It feels long, but that's not long. We are talking about 20 years of KuppingerCole as an analyst company, which has been founded 20 years ago. And for that reason, I've invited three first members of KuppingerCole to this episode. So people who were there at KuppingerCole from day one, I want to welcome Jörg Resch, I want to welcome Alexei Balaganski and the source of the name, half of the name Martin Kuppinger. Hi to all of you three. It's great to have you and having three people who were there at first, at the first day is of course a perfect entry for the question to say, could you take us back to the early days of KuppingerCole? What made you create that company, Martin, what made you found this company?
So I have a very long legacy in the identity space. So probably some additional decade and more beyond KuppingerCole. And I had done some work writing books, journalists work, all seen the analyst world. And I found that there's a gap and a need for an analyst firm with the focus on identity management, we then later on evolved into cybersecurity. And I was a bit looking for sort of "partners in crime", so to speak. And I had a very long history with Jörg already back then. Maybe Jörg can comment a bit on that, where our joint history started. So that was your first impression of the why Jörg came in and Jörg can probably best tell how Alexei came in.
So if I remember right, we met for the first time 1993, could that be?
1992 even.
1992. Oh, wow. At that time, I just had started working for a Frankfurt company. They did seminars and conferences in the tech sector. And I was the one who created some of these seminars and workshops and conferences. And I was always looking around for smart speakers on certain topics, tech topics, obviously. And I think the first seminar where I reached out to Martin as one of those smart speakers who was very renowned for the topic of those seminars we did together due to those many books he had already written in young years. I think it was Windows NT, the topic of that seminar, wasn't it? And soon after, we did seminars like Internet topics, TCPIP, networking in general. Probably there were some other standards still there, wasn't it Novell? Didn't you do something on Novell as well?
I'm quite sure. I would assume I did. I've also written some books around Novell NetWare. As I've said, I'm a bit of a veteran in that area.
Yes, so that was the initial part of our joint, of our relationship, business relationship and friendship. Then, after working for that Frankfurt company, Institute of International Research, I think was its name, IIR, it doesn't exist anymore, I founded a company called Novolabs. That was a software company. And what we produced was something like a small groupware kind of thing already based on internet standards. We called it DICE, Dynamic Internet Collaboration Environment. The challenges, of course, we had was like cloud didn't exist yet. So we had to run our own server farm and all these kinds of things. And during creating and launching that dynamic internet collaboration environment, Alexei was one of my most important, probably the most important software engineers I hired. I hired him in Novosibirsk, where we had a small development center in Russia, which is very difficult to... to understand nowadays, but then this was something really special to have a group of smart developers working somewhere in Russia. In this case, it was Novosibirsk. And identity management, of course, was a very important topic then already when we produced that software. And after Novolabs, when I found my way back to what Martin did. I think he one day phoned me up and asked me, listen, I would like to found an analyst company focused on digital ID, on identity and access management. Would you like to join? Then I said, yes, that would be a good idea. And I took Alexei with me, more or less, and we co-founded KuppingerCole. So that was the very beginning of the company. Did I forget something, Alexei?
Well, yeah, you're absolutely right. At least that part when I joined this team. Our relationship goes back to about 1998 or 97, something like that, when Novolabs was established. And yeah, for me, it was actually the first full-time job in IT. I was a student back then. I was absolutely impressed by Jörg's idea. Again, you have to understand, what he proposed back then in the year 97 was what Google basically has invented 10 years later with Gmail and all the collaboration software, now all use and love or hate, if you will. So in a way, Jörg's idea was unfortunately a little bit ahead of the times.
Too early!
Killed by innovation.
Too early. I have to say that even back then we actually had quite a few successful implementations and happy customers. It all came to an end, when Jörg decided to sell the company to a large investor. And basically, we were outed. We've lost all the control over that stuff. And we came back to this being a small and independent team. And I guess this is why we are remaining small or relatively small and independent ever since. That's in our DNA.
Yeah, the great days or the interesting days, at least of the new economy back then, where so many things happened. And maybe also that made Jörg found an analyst company because he was too early with DICE. And analysts tend to be also sometimes a bit too early with their predictions. So things sometimes take longer than we predict. Anyway, that's how KuppingerCole Analysts started.
I have to say, if you allow me to add this, within KuppingerCole, we continued kind of that game of predicting things pretty early and then discussing it first internally, with Alexei saying, oh no, that's all nothing. Then Martin saying, well, it could be that this will be successful. So, you know, we iterated it around. And we anticipated quite a few trends in those last 20 years, didn't we?
Yes, we definitely did. And I think we were very early for everything which is decentralized identity. We were following this and I think also to a bit bringing in our own ideas into this for almost all the time KuppingerCole was around. And in many other areas, we also were very early. And I think this having ideas cycling around is still happening. When I look at many of my EIC keynotes, they start with Jörg saying, oh, there's something on the horizon. Martin, talk about it. And then it takes me quite some work to sort of get it to bring it to the reality and into a set of slides. But I think this is also why we had quite a number of things coming up. And I think a lot of the things which are happening now and which are the potential of decentralized identity, for instance, we talked about at EIC some 12 or 13 years ago, under the term of life management platforms. And this is what we probably will see sooner rather than later now, because the technology is there, because we see the things evolving. So yes, that's a bit of KuppingerCole Analysts. Matthias, maybe back to you.
Yeah, that was the nucleus. We have a few of the early members still within the company. We have Betty on top of that. We have Oscar, who was an early joiner. How was work different way back then and how did it evolve about along these 10 years that I couldn't be a part of? How did work start for KuppingerCole? How did it evolve? I think there were several stations in between. There was Düsseldorf, there was then Wiesbaden and the working team grew and the working together changed and the products changed. And I think this is where Jörg and Martin came together when it came to analysts plus events. Maybe you can talk a bit about the early days of EIC, maybe Jörg.
Yeah, as I already mentioned, I used to work for that Frankfurt company doing seminars, workshops and conferences in tech. And even before that, I at some point was involved in doing, preparing events. Like for example, when I used to work for the government, my very early times in the foreign office as a cultural attaché, I did cultural events. So events always was something which played a role in my professional career. And I found back to that after we had founded KuppingerCole, I took over the task to create a flagship event. And that was very early. In the very early days of KuppingerCole, within the first three years, we decided to run a European conference on digital ID.
And there already in the very beginning, we thought that it is important to create something as a counterweight to what is going on in America, in the USA, because we have different needs over here. We have different perspectives, for example, on privacy. So we wanted to create a platform, an exchange, a community on the European vision of digital identity. And this is why we created the European Identity Conference later on called the European Identity and Cloud Conference.
Yeah. And interestingly, that conference became a global conference. So it's really a conference when we look at all of the bookings coming in for this year, it goes again from the US to Japan and Australia and New Zealand. So it's really a very global conference. But it always has also the European focus. So I think this makes us also a bit unique because we are global analysts, we are global influencers, but we have always a true global focus in the sense of: Europe is important, APAC is important, America is important, global. And this is, I think, what makes us a bit distinct. Alexei.
What I wanted to add to the early history of the EIC is that basically, from a somewhat outside perspective, at least like me looking at this, having no previous experience with event management, I still consider it a wonder in a way, because Jörg basically did all the work himself and he managed to bring an amazing team of people, speakers and participants. I think it was about 250 to 300 people attending the first year?
The first one was 320, I think.
Yeah, and most of those people, they are, they've remained with us. I mean, they are returning every year. They are also like world caliber experts and visionaries and whatever. And we know everybody and everybody knows Jörg and Martin, of course, and KuppingerCole. And I have to say, EIC became a success even though the people were starving at EIC number one because the caterer greatly failed. So the people who have been at EIC number one tend to bring it up again, the story when we meet them at lunch at EIC nowadays, they say, oh, there's so much food compared to our first editions. So even this part of that, and this shows how great the content was of this event.
You should not mention this without also mentioning the second EIC. It was the EIC with the most food ever. I think three times more food than people could eat. So we were very keen on not letting anybody feel hungry anymore at any moment of the conference. So that was the contrary.
Alexei, your role when it comes to you first being, of course, you're a trained mathematician, if I remember correctly, but then you were a developer in Jörg's team and then joined KuppingerCole as an analyst. How did your role evolve? I know you are a great presenter, you are a great analyst, but how did you contribute, for example, to these events, but also to the paperwork that KuppingerCole produced then and produces now?
Well, since now I am kind of wearing two hats - I am an analyst, but I'm also the CTO of KuppingerCole. And that was actually my first job. Because of course, like everything technology related was my responsibility. And again, kind of back then when we didn't have cloud and managed services available, it was always a challenge, but a really interesting one. And years after, kind of I thought, well since I am so deeply involved in all these topics anyway, why don't I try to write something about it? Martin has agreed that I can be an analyst too, and since then, since about 2012, I think I am sharing those two positions.
I have to add a bit more clear sentences. Alexei is one of those examples I've had in my professional life who had incredible talent to do everything from bottom to top. His first task with EIC was he had to create a website. He had to create a whole back end application to manage speakers. He had to write the software to make the agenda visible on the website. So he did everything around EIC, the registration process, the booking. Nothing of that we would have had without Alexei.
Yeah. And maybe also going back to one of the points, Matthias, you brought up a bit earlier. So how did this company evolve? I think when we look at what we talked about in the past minutes, we started very, very small, very virtual, very agile. Then we moved, usually because Jörg moved. So that's why we started with the first office in the Düsseldorf region where Jörg lived back then. Then he relocated to Wiesbaden and the company in that sense moved with the headquarter to Wiesbaden. I always stayed in Stuttgart. And also the way we collaborated clearly has changed. I think when we go back 20 years, we didn't have Teams chat or things like that. A bit of Skype probably, I'm not exactly sure whether it was out back then. But at the end of the day, it was really a bit of... So we were always very virtual, but clearly it were different tools, different ways to collaborate. A lot of things came in then over time like SharePoint and other stuff. So that was also an evolution. And then latest with the pandemic, we got much more virtual again. So anyway, being as an analyst firm, very virtual. So we have people in the US, we have people in the UK, in Poland, in Austria, in Germany, et cetera. So we are really a global company, but also very distributed and very... yeah, still, I believe agile company a lot of things going on really in that manner. So that may be to contribute to the question you raised earlier, Matthias. We haven't forgotten that question.
Yeah, Martin, we worked from home way before it became cool or even a necessity. And I love it because on one hand, as you just said, it allowed us to grow our team very easily and internationally. On the other hand, basically, we are still extremely agile and flexible and result based instead of counting the working hours and stuff like that, which is why I guess I stuck around so long.
Absolutely. And if I look at, you just mentioned that earlier, EIC, the name changed, but the acronym didn't. So the way that the topics we cover as KuppingerCole changed over time, is there something that you praise yourself for being really forward looking over these 20 years? I think the additional C about cloud is something where you were earlier covering that topic already. But are there any topics that you would say this would look different without KuppingerCole over these last 20 years? Maybe Martin?
You know, would look different. That's always a big question because in every evolution, there are so many people there. And I think what we created is a place where a lot of people that are influential to the overall evolution of the identity industry and beyond, gathered. And these gatherings also help driving things. So I know for sure that some of the standards we use every day sort of at least had a huge impact from people gathering at EIC discussing what we need, what we need to change and drive things forward. And so I think this is very typical for these gatherings. And I think we also always gave a place to people with very visionary ideas at EIC, for instance. But also when we look at research things we covered. We had this, we always also pushed standards. So we had this European Identity Award for the best innovation, standard innovation for more or less from the very beginning. And I believe a lot of the standards we awarded weren't really popular when they got the European Identity Award, but they came very popular. Take FIDO2, we looked at FIDO2 way before it became the de facto standard. And many others. So I think this is where we definitely in that sense were at least helpful, influential is a very big word, but at least helpful in fostering the evolution of digital identity.
Yeah, providing a platform, I think that is important. Alexei, you wanted to add something?
I just wanted to say that that's absolutely true. It was really interesting to see. It was always the day before the EIC launches when we had those specialized workshops and people were basically coming to discuss the growth, the evolution of their standards. And well, some of those companies are now defining those standards on a much larger scale. But yeah, I guess Martin is right. We were providing this helping hand and the platform for years and it's really amazing.
But also from a research perspective, there are things, you know, when I look at the research perspective, for instance, the Identity Fabric, the Identity Fabric is something we created a couple of years ago, and which has become sort of the de facto standard as the primary concept for really for IAM for identity and access management picked up by many other parties. So there are definitely things that have achieved a very big visibility from different things we did. So I think we can... honestly, I'm a bit proud of what we have reached.
We are looking at digital services right now. So we are expanding the things that KuppingerCole does beyond the traditional research part, the events part and the advisory part, which I'm representing a bit. And we have the digital services. But in the end, I'm a strong believer in people and brains and innovation through individuals. How did the work between the three of you and Betty and all the others that were there very early carried that company over these 20 years. How important was the collaboration between the three of you and the bigger founding team earlier? Is this important? Does this play a role? I think yes, but I want to, of course, have your opinion there as well. Maybe Jörg?
I will not focus only on the very early ones. What we developed in those very early days, what already has been described, is the ability to flexibly work together with people joining, freshly joining the team. So we were agile enough to include everybody who joined the team. We were able to grow in a way that was very productive. This is one of the core capabilities that we created then. And nowadays, imagine we are still not a very big team, but the way our achievements, if you look at, for example, EIC, a conference which this year will have 325 speakers and more than 200 hours of program, 1500 delegates. It's a huge conference. Imagine what kind of team normally such a huge conference would manage. And at KuppingerCole, this is still a small team and it is possible because the way we work together is extremely productive. This is what we learn from the very beginning to productively work together because we need to productively work together otherwise things would not be getting done in such a small company.
And if I might add words on top of that, just to remind you I came as a foreigner, as a student basically back then into this company. And I'm surprised how diverse and informal and quote unquote democratic our team still is even after all these years of growth. I know that maybe for our American colleagues, it's not nothing important, not a great achievement because it's all in their politics and DNA, but again for Germany, it's a surprising achievement. Again, we were diverse way before it became cool. And we still remain that way.
Yeah. And by the way, small is a relative term right now. So I wouldn't say we are very small, but we are still surely not the biggest analyst firm, but we have also grown quite a bit in all areas. And I think this is also something which is definitely an achievement. And I would also agree that we still have a lot of ability for everyone to unfold the own capabilities and deliver and find its own place and space and contribute to the company.
Don't call it small, call it effective and efficient. I think that's a good starting point. This is really working out. So with us now celebrating this 20-year milestone, so it's 20 years plus a few days, I think it was early March or April when it was founded, so really just at the 20-year step. And we can look back on lots of milestones. EIC really growing, almost exploding, starting in Munich in Deutsches Museum and then moving to another location close to Munich and now finally coming to Berlin and it's already getting to its limits there as well. So what do you anticipate as next milestones if you look forward? What are you working on when it comes to us talking for the 25th anniversary? So look at the next five years, maybe starting with you Alexei, what do you envision for the next five years of KuppingerCole?
Well, from the research perspective, of course, we will definitely continue to expand our coverage, obviously, because there are so many new topics. Of course, one that everyone is talking about is AI nowadays, and we do already cover that, but who knows what would become hot the next few years. And I really love that on the one hand, again, we are staying on top of every new development. But on the other hand, we are not riding the hype wave. There is always this kind of a skeptic culture deeply rooted in our DNA, again, as a company. At least I am the skeptic, if you will. And again, I believe that we will continue to deliver a truly neutral and independent second opinion on every hot topic in that regard. When it comes to events, of course, I am not the person to give you any specific numbers. I know that Jörg and his team would probably make it even bigger and maybe we will have to move to a bigger location again. But I think we are ready now, right? I mean, again. We did it so many times, it's a piece of cake now.
Seems like. Martin, your thoughts for the next five years?
You know, I think we have many ideas. I think what is very important for an organization that is growing is also that it becomes less dependent on single individuals. I think this is clearly part of the journey for a company that is 20 years old. And I think we have so many great people in our company, which also helps us in moving forward in that journey so that it's not... It's not just Martin, by far not. There are so many excellent analysts we have and many of them are so much better than me in many areas. And this clearly will also be a part of a job to further mentor the team because these are the stars of tomorrow and frequently of today.
Final thoughts, maybe Jörg, when you look at the next five years, what do you expect?
If you want to know my expectations, just look into the EIC agenda of this year. Track number one is clearly focused on the question, how will AI influence the way we live and work? And what is it about? What is the role of digital identity in that way AI will evolve and develop and change our lives? Track number two is digital ID inside the enterprise, our traditional strong topic. Track number three is digital ID beyond the enterprise. And there we see with decentralized identity, with the governance frameworks around it just now evolving like eIDAS 2.0 in Europe. This will give us another 10 to 15 years of intense change within the digital ID market and the way how we look at digital ID. And we learn from day to day more that digital ID is really the core of everything. Also of the way how AI will influence our life, how AI will be made secure, how deep fakes, for example, can be avoided. It's all about identity management, knowing who is doing what and was it a machine or was it a human. So we are in the center of where innovation is taking place. And I can promise you it will be another five or 10 very, very interesting years if we will have inside KuppingerCole.
And by the way, speaking of cybersecurity, let's not forget we now have a second yearly conference which is focusing specifically on that huge area. And again, I believe that where KuppingerCole, the company, has this great position is that we have experience in both identity and cybersecurity. And as we all know, neither is nowadays even technically possible without the other one, right? So although we do have two different conferences, there is still a substantial, if not direct overlap, but at least mutual influence and cross pollination, if you will. And again, this is something which will only grow in the next five years.
Thank you Alexei for reminding us of that because this is really an important aspect. We talked a lot of EIC because it was early there when we talked about the 20 years, but we really grew in that area as well and we want to show our expertise in that area as well. And as you said, they don't work without the other and that is really of importance. Quick round, we have two minutes left. Alexei, your thoughts about the last 20 years, or the next five years, choose one and what would be your final sentence around KuppingerCole turning 20 now?
Well, first of all, those 20 years flew past me like a week or something. It was never a boring moment and I'm really looking forward to at least another 20 years at KuppingerCole.
All right, Martin.
I just can agree with Alexei, it never was boring in the past 20 years.
Jörg.
Oh well, I'll stick more to the past. So with regards to the future, I'll retire soon and I will be a spectator, maybe even an attendee at some of the conferences KuppingerCole will do in future time. But my focus will be more on reading books, cycling, and maybe sometimes windsurfing.
Right, okay. Yeah, but that's also perspective that one can share with you. So that sounds nice as well. I can agree with the time flying by. It doesn't feel like 10 years for me either. Thank you very much, Alexei. Thank you very much, Martin and Jörg, for being my guests for this episode, for sharing thoughts and memories from the first 20 years of KuppingerCole and before that and after that. I'm really looking forward to doing the same for 25 years and you will be all invited. Thank you very much for being my guest today.
