Interview with Jackson Shaw

Welcome trackin again. Nice. Two of us have a, have a long history each other for many years. And thank you for getting up early. Must be really early for you. I believe.

Yeah, it's I, I, well, I was up for, at 3:00 AM and it's I guess what, four 30, right? Five 30 I'm in Quebec. So I'm enjoying, I'm enjoying my COVID lockdown here for another few weeks. Okay.

So, so let's get started and sure. So, so you brought up this big title, I would say. So it's time for an identity revolution. And so revolution always is a big word. Yes.

Why, why do you go for that big word then? Well, you know, I mean, you kind of said this in, in your own introduction that you've been working in this business for a long time.

And, you know, I, I think the, the, the thing I've seen over history is, you know, a number of great vendors come and go, but a number of great vendors building out identity products or IGA products or lifecycle management, prod products, and continue to build them and build them and build them, you know, so that there's a, you know, a fairly big infrastructure around them. And while folks are doing this, like if I think back to that diagram of, of, you know, all the things that you have to build around an IGA platform, the environment is gaining around customers.

You know, E when I first started at zoom, there was no such thing as the cloud, or it was, was very different. You know, the cloud was, you know, email going from one person to another, you know, as time went on and, and as time goes on in the market, things change in many different ways. And IGA vendors are forced to, you know, rebuild and rethink a lot of the things that they've been working on. And a lot of the things that they've built and you've got, like I said, this huge architectural debt that you've built up and, you know, you get these islands that folks build.

And I think, you know, it's all been good. There's been a lot of movement forward in the industry, but at the same point in time, like I said, it's like, why isn't this like a riding a bicycle? Why can't you move from one identity vendor to another identity vendor and basically be able to reuse those skills that you learned when you first rode your bike.

I really think that if we can build on a platform where we don't have to have all of the architectural debt around things like, you know, all these cool new things like AI and ML that I was starting to build in my last job, that, and let us concentrate on all the cool stuff around sod and access, certifications, and reviews that we can actually be more revolutionary, but what we're doing and not just evolve little by little, not have to build a chatbot experience when it's already there on the platform.

So I, I really just think that, you know, you, you've seen all this rip and replace over the years because the market changes and the product doesn't keep up with it. You know, my idea of revolution is let's build on a platform where there's, you know, in this particular case, there's over 3000 people working on it behind the scenes. I wanna ride their work and concentrate on the identity part. And I think if, if we can do that successfully, we, we can, we can basically be the start of revolution. Okay. I think that's, that's an interesting part.

You also touched on this during your keynote and when I listen to your keynote, it, I remember some of the questions I think we had in, in very early releases of our leadership C and also used and or asked way before, for instance, for, to provision vendors, are you able to leverage an external workflows if your organization goes for separate external workflow system, are you able to leverage that? Because obviously there might be specifics on, in IHA. On the other hand, you might already have such a platform back in these years. It was not the, the platform of that level.

We find the service now and other layers in the market, but it was really a little bit different, but even then I think this was something which was raised, or I remember one. And was that when you look at all this data, the creation capabilities, what, what makes this different from meta data management solutions at the end of the? So I think there always have been some technical technologies out there, which really were redundant to what we find in virtually every HAA solution as a sort of a custom development.

And I think that that is from that perspective, I think what you're saying fits quite well, and some of the things I've been asking vendors for for years. So, so I'm with you. And I see the other thing is maybe we touched this a little. I remember some, some conceptual discuss. I was some while ago and which was reflected on some of the standard advisor slides we were using at, which was around segregating data and identity and logic. And when I take one of your LA you're losing slides, you have this, this data layer in between. Yes. I would say that exactly is, is reflecting this email.

You could argue that data layer again is some in some way proprietary the login because it's at the ServiceNow platform, but you already, you push this, this idea. So, so, so I would say we we're pretty much on the same page, but I think when we, for instance, look at this, okay, there's this one data layer, which then is on a certain platform. It brings us to a second aspect, which is there must be some negative aspects to your approach. So which one do you see there?

So, or where do you see the risks? Where do you see the strengths and opportunities? Right.

Well, you know, it's, you would, you would have to really not be paying attention if you didn't understand that we, as a company are making a bet on service now. So if, if you think that that's a risk or a company, think that that's a risk, then, then clearly that's some, that's a risk that probably has to be mitigated.

You know, when I flip that around from an opportunity perspective, it's probably a lot easier to make a bet and take a risk on service. Now, for example, than it would be on, you know, any of the vendors that I've worked with in the past.

I mean, potentially excluding Microsoft, obviously, who has, you know, the, the, the, the breadth and the staying power of a service now and vice versa. But, you know, we've, we've made that decision to be on service now in the future, we may, we may think about another platform, but you know, our target, our target today is customers that have, that have service now.

So that's probably, you know, a, a concern for someone who doesn't have service now, but like I said, the thing I really liked about, and which drew me to service now into clear sky is, you know, the, the amazing capabilities of ServiceNow, the number of customers that have it, and where they sit in the marketplace as a, as a leader in, in, in this, in this view, in this field, I do agree potential risk Check. Some may not be that, that you also have in some way, a risk as a, as a vendor, relying on workflow, on data management and AI analytics, etc.

Capabilities provided that case by service. Now that service now at some point might take a direction, which is fairly different from the one you'd like them to take.

So, so that some of the capabilities you'd like to build on are trust, either retired or missing or so, or that they come up with large conceptual changes, which in other way affect what you're doing. Isn't that also a risk for you, right?

Well, I, yeah, I, I think we could say it's a risk, but I mean, we we've mitigated that risk in a couple ways. I, I mean, you can never say there's zero risk, but, you know, we're really lucky that in the funding round, before I joined the company, ServiceNow invested in clear sky for us, that's a huge advantage because we have, you know, special treatment and TBD exactly what special treatment means. But we have, you know, quarterly business reviews with their product management team. We have business executive sponsorship.

So we have, you know, very tight and deep integration with ServiceNow. The other thing is that that's not just a concern of a small vendor, like clear sky. It's the concern of every customer who makes a bet on service now. And I just feel that the risk is mitigated by the fact that there are, you know, 10,000 enterprise customers out there that, you know, in addition to us, obviously that are making these bets on those kind of workflows and AI and ML and a lot of those other things.

So I, I think, I think we've mitigated that risk as best as we, we possibly can. I think a lot of the things that service now is built into their product, like backwards compatibility from release to release, you know, our, our most recent release right now is going through compatibility, checking with ServiceNow for the Paris release.

You know, a lot of this work that we do with them mitigates, mitigates that risk. Okay.

But, but you, you mentioned more in a, in a buy sentence that you might consider supporting other platforms in the future as well. So, so is there something where you're actively looking at saying, okay, there's service now, there's whatever Salesforce, as a platform, there are a couple of other layers which come with certain types of platforms.

So, so is there something you have in mind? Well, it's something it's something we have in mind, you know, and I'll be a hundred percent, you know, honest with you.

It's, it's, it, it's something that we're looking at. I, we don't actively have people working on other platforms at this point in time.

It's more, you know, if we wanted to do something on Salesforce, does Salesforce have the, you know, ecosystem? Does Salesforce have the capabilities that we would need? For example, like you saw that slide where, where I showed the different silos, can I accomplish everything I need on, on a particular platform service now, you know, obviously we've made that choice. Something like Salesforce, something like potentially a Workday or another product may very well have that same, that same platform.

So I think, you know, over the next year, as, as we grow and we, we understand our customers better, we're gonna look at that and, and think about that as a, as a, as a future topic. But for the, for the time being right now, we're just concentrating on service now.

But, you know, as, as I was hired and brought in, one of the things that I was asked to do was to look at some of those, some of those different platforms for the future. Yeah.

And, and there might be more, which I, when we look at some of these very large, I a I platforms, they are continuously expanding their capabilities. So yeah.

Will be, will remain interesting and hopefully made architecture of what you do yourself in a way that can run, can be, or Porwal exactly rather easily throughout platform. So that definitely is interesting to see maybe one more question around it. So if a customer makes the better service now, so we, we I'm real, along in the industry, I'm long industry, we have seen then also these migrations away from some of these platforms, which sometimes still are popular or have been popular that might be just caused by a merger, inquisition by whatever something goes wrong in the project.

And, and, and CIOs, we do it totally different by strategic decisions of CIOs, etcetera. So there there's still a situation or can be a situation of a customer who says, okay, ServiceNow has been strategic, but I take a different path right now. That would mean for, for the IGA team. At the end of the day, they must move with the rest of the, the enterprise and such a scenario. What would be your answer for, for the IGA teams or for the IM teams on that question?

Well, you know, this, this plays very well. You know, when, when we talked a couple moments ago about risk and, and again, one of the key reasons why we wanted to build on service.

Now, the whole aspect of digital transformation is typically a board and seed level executive decision. And when a company makes a decision around digital transformation and, and starts working on a platform and a plan to, to, to realize a whole set of goals and something like ServiceNow is a key component of that chances or the risk associated with that being sort of ripped and replaced is, is, is a lot more remote.

If it were to happen, then you can imagine it's not just the IGA and the identity team that has to be concerned about moving to a different platform or, or, or going in a different direction. But it's all of the things associated with that platform, including I TSM and potentially GRC and HR and all the other things that ServiceNow brings to the brings to the platform.

So in some ways we're mitigating our risk by being built on a platform and being more strategic to the company and a platform that's more strategic in the company than being in a, our own platform with our own set of architectural debt and risks and being outside of the digital transformation.

So I think one of the most important things for us was to become part of the digital transformation wave, ride that with ServiceNow, there's always the risk of, of that, you know, being changed underneath us Martin, as you, as you mentioned, but I, I think it's much less risk for us and for our customers to be associated with such a great platform like ServiceNow. Okay.

Fair, fair point then. So, so you, you talked about the revolution and I, I would agree with we seeing fundamental changes in the overall identity management market.

So when, when you look at what we described as our identity fabrics concept, which we also covered in the one other of our Casey life event, starting with the first one, when, when you look at the, the shift from monolithic on premise architectures to microservice container based yes. Architectures that can run in various deployment models.

And which also in fact are part of a shift to utilize things, to utilize services, which are already there, where you, you take a specific Ryan of the interesting question maybe to, to you as, as another in this industry would be why, why hasn't that revolution been there already? Or maybe why didn't you start a revolution earlier? Right. Right.

Well, I think that's a great, that's a really, really great question, Martin. And I, I would say there's two things that, that come to my mind. The first one is, well, you have to have a catalyst for any revolution, right? And the catalyst, you know, in my mind has been this whole aspect of, you know, a platform that you could build on and innovate on that is radically different than anything else.

And, and that's where we think ServiceNow is come in and, you know, the additional catalyst being this whole aspect of digital transformation and re re-engineering and re ideating a company strategy. The second thing is that, you know, if I think of, even back to my zit days, we started building that product in 1996, we had our first beta in 1996, we were acquired by Microsoft in 1999. It was the same product.

It evolved at Microsoft, you know, until I left in 2005 and continued to evolve after that, the huge amount of, you know, architectural debt that you build around an IGA or an identity product makes it really difficult for it to evolve, you know, and, and well, you can evolve it, but it's hard to revolutionize. And you can see how companies have tried to revolutionize things like Oracle, with what they did in their move to the cloud, other IGA vendors who had on-prem products and, and try to move to the cloud and you have multiple products and they're, they're all different in how they work.

So part of it is the industry itself held, held itself back. We built partnerships and we built, you know, products on top of architectures that were inflexible. We built pro we, we, we built multiple products and instead of starting completely fresh on a new platform, we've basically boxed ourselves into a corner in my opinion. So I think it would've been harder to do this earlier. And I think now with, with, with a platform like service now, I think that's an opportunity for revolutionary, you know, happening in this industry. Yeah.

I think overall, I think there's, what is the digital transformation cloud first microservice architectures container waste deployments platforms available that really helps to do things differently than in the, the old days. And so, yes, I would agree. So with that, we are, at the end of the time we had, I think we could continue speaking for hours, but back to any, thank you very much, Jackson.