Clicker. I think he put it out clicker. Okay. And I need some water. Is it a coincidence, a happy coincidence that I'm the third Canadian, I think, right. Nothing wrong with that. Right.
So, well, I thought I would start, it's not my first time here at this conference, although it seems like it's about the fourth company, but really the same company. So I, I thought I would just, you know, briefly tell you that in 2005, I started with quest software. We were sold to Dell, I don't know, four years ago now. And we were just spun out of Dell and acquired by a private equity firm. So we're now back to sort of quest software, but we're the business inside of quest software called one identity, our own company. So there you go. And, you know, just so you know, I love feeling like a little startup, you know, quarter almost a quarter billion dollars in revenue. So it's kind of a cool thing, 7,000 customers. And, and that's kind of what I'm gonna talk about today. I'd love to say that I'm talking about some, you know, very strategic things, but I'm gonna talk a little bit about some of the observations I've had over, over, over the last year, year and a half around digital transformation.
You know, so we, a lot of us, if you've got gray hair, like me have been at this for a long time, I started years and years ago. Well, I remember writing an application on a mainframe for creating student accounts years ago, before there was even a word called provisioning or identity and access management. But the main thing that I've noticed is we've had a lot of time over the last 25 or so years to gel our identity and access management systems. On-prem, we've got a lot of experience with it. All of the vendors ourselves included have worked with mainframes have worked with active directory now, Azure active directory and, and all kinds of different systems, but I'm still disappointed. And I, and I say this of myself also as a vendor, that it still seems to cost an awful lot of money to get an IAM system purchased and deployed.
You know, the industry says three to 10 times the cost, you know, your, your mileage may vary. But the, the thing I see, and I was even talking to a customer earlier today in this exact situation, you know, customers are forced to maintain, you know, a lot of cases, on-prem personnel. It's like when you bought the mainframe. When I used to work at university of Ottawa, we had IBM guys that sat there to help us, right? So this, just, this, this, this goes on with a lot of different pieces of software. You know, upgrades are costly, you know, both from a, not just doing an upgrade, but the find the, the time in doing an upgrade, but just regression testing. You know, again, a topic I discussed with a customer today is just that regression testing of going from one version to another. And it has been seen as a cost center, right?
IM is managed by it. It is a cost center. Therefore I am is, is a cost center. So, you know, to me, this is just like some of these things that we haven't as an industry fixed over the last 25 years or so. So I wanted to fast forward a little bit to present, present day. As I say, here, the clouds move in and they kind of spoil our perfect weather. And I say that because when I go out and I talk to customers and you ask them, okay, how many on-prem systems do you have? And they say, okay, we've got seven or eight or 12 different on-prem systems. And like I said, in the previous slide, you know, we sit down and we do the connector for active directory and we do the connector for this. And we do the connector for that. And, you know, everything's done and up and running.
And then you start now talking about customers and what they're doing in the cloud. And a few years ago, it was the same kind of thing you had maybe Salesforce and you had service. Now, nowadays there are some of our customers that literally have 1200 and I'm not kidding, 1200 different cloud systems they're trying to connect to. Okay. It, it, it completely boggles the mind and, and can boggle any system shadow. It is taken over. I mean, you guys all know what this is. There's all kinds of folks inside your company that are buying different SaaS applications. And the it department in, in the long run ends up having to integrate with these systems. A lot of the shadow it systems are being bought, or these, these SAS products are being bought in this sense. And they're being thrown away when people don't want to use them anymore, or they find something that they don't like, you know, I might sign up for something. I might not like it after a month. And I toss it out. It's very easy to do that. So in some ways the IM products are getting this sort of forced onto them. We get asked these questions. I want to be able to switch off your product real easily. Why can't I do that? Or how do I do that? And you know, this pressure is constantly there around what I would call the traditional IM vendors like myself and, and, and others about reducing pricing, reducing costs, just everything related to an acquisition.
So one of the things that's been going on and I've been, I watch very closely is this whole aspect of customer. I am, it's evolving as a segment. And the key thing where I see this sort of interplay is between customer IAM and digital transformation. There are so many companies that are putting up beside their identity management system, their traditional identity manage management system, a customer identity management system with the whole, you know, the, the whole perspective of getting closer with their customers. And it started to make me think about digital transformation within what I do on a day to day basis, which is try to set the strategy for what we're doing with our own products. So, as I say here, I don't feel that we have been now. I'm sure some of my, my competitors would wanna argue that with me, but just generally speaking, I don't feel that we have transformed ourselves as an industry that well, and I'm not sure what everybody else is doing, but I'm gonna, I just wanted to fill you in on some of the things that you know, we're starting to do.
And some of the things that I think are quite positive. So one of the things that I think is quite important is pricing. We've been spending a lot of time internally talking about this and removing the lock in around pricing, doing things that make it a lot easier for our customers to purchase, unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on which side of the fence you live on, it makes it easier for customers to throw waste software. Also, I think that's hugely important because to be honest until there's pressure on the vendors like myself, that a customer can walk away from a, a product they're not gonna improve the products as fast as they probably need to be improved another area. And again, something I talked about today with a, with a customer is deployment wanting to deploy a product in new fashions where customers can deploy something on premise.
If they want it, they can deploy it in the cloud. They can deploy it in their own private cloud. They can deploy it on Amazon. They can deploy it on Azure, wherever they want. And from that, we think that Docker is going to be a huge change for us in particular, but also for other vendors that wanna follow suit. This started with a couple of customers that came to me over a year ago and said, you know, could you please help us take Microsoft's money? And, and I didn't quite understand what they were talking about. And then they said, well, we get all these credits for Azure. And we'd really like to run your software in Azure, because if we ran your software in Azure, we wouldn't have to pay any costs for spinning discs because we've got all these credits. And I began to think a little bit about that.
And, you know, with, with sort of where Docker was going, we made this decision that we were gonna invest fairly heavily in Docker and allow customers whether it's on Amazon or in particular on Azure, where a lot of the enterprise customers do have Azure credits to run our software for free, at least from a, from an operating cost. So very important to us, also the same thing around allowing your partner to do something. Again, a lot of customers come to us and say, we want our partner, our preferred partner X to run this software and manage this software on our behalf, but we want them to run it in their own data data center, or they want to run in their own data center. So again, Docker is a perfect solution for that.
So the other thing again, faced with this problem of how do we connect in particular, we did this for this one customer. This is how the, the thinking all started was how do you integrate 1200 systems with your identity and access management stack? It is not an easy task. I mean, even if you think that you can create a connector to system X and it takes one week of creating it, testing it, testing it with your different systems, running some use cases, et cetera, putting in an operation, well, take one week and multiply it by 1200. That's a lot of weeks. So we thought a lot about it. And, and we said, well, you know, skim is the answer, which is a standard was great to talk about standards. You know, hearing Pam talk about them. But unfortunately, very few people support, skim. We supported some of the, my competitors support it.
Other folks support it, but they only support it in a very basic sense. And we can't just integrate with everything through skim, unfortunately. So we took a little different tack and, and I want to tell you what we did, which I think is quite interesting. We decided rather than taking the approach of let's go out and tell every customer that, or every third party out there that you should support skim. We basically stumbled across a really interesting product. It's an integration platform as a service iPads. If you don't know anything about iPads, I, you know, will invite you to take a look at that. As a takeaway from my presentation, you may have heard of Dell boomy, you may have heard of MuleSoft. Those two products are UMass, both highly rated. And of course, we ran into the Dell Boomie product and we were part of Dell, which was, which was interesting and a great takeaway for us.
So what we basically decided to do was we took this IPAs product, like I said, you could use MuleSoft, you could use boomy. And we wrapped skim around it so that we could talk to the iPads product using skim, and the iPads product would talk to everything up there in the cloud. And all these iPads products are built to do the same thing, transform data from one cloud system to another cloud system. So you need to take data like we do every day out of an Oracle system and feed it into Salesforce. You need to take something outta Salesforce and feed it into our marketing system. We do that every day using an iPad. And the idea at the time was, well, wouldn't it be great if some of that data that we could transfer from one system to another was identity data. So what we basically did was we wrapped this around skim and basically using Dell Boomi, we can connect to any of these different systems.
Now, the nice thing about it is because we have skim on both sides of the equation. Anybody either by writing a program, that's talk skim, or by using a product that talks skim, could connect to this, to connect to any of these systems. Okay. So the nice thing about it is you only have one connector to deal with a skim connector, not 1200 connectors, like the customer that, that we were dealing with. So whether you're using Oracle's product or you're using Microsoft's product, or you're using somebody else's product, you could theoretically do this. If you wanted to. And, you know, it's an open API. So you know what, there's nothing that really stops anybody from doing that. So that's kind of one way we're trying to digitally transform that aspect of things. The other thing we're trying to do, and we're working on right now at some of my colleagues are working on, as we speak is how do we, you know, the whole thing about customer IM is having more of a direct channel in a direct touch with your end customer.
And I kind of looked at it this way. I said, well, if, if the customer is all about customer IAM and the employee is all about traditional identity and access management, then the two things are interchangeable. So why am I not trying in my business to have a closer connection to the employees in a company? Because quite frankly, most traditional IAM systems don't have great connection with the employees. So we've been spending a tremendous amount of time working on things like service bot for our employees. If today, one of the things that's helped digitally transform companies themselves is talking to their customers through service bots. I'm sure you've all seen them. You all use them. Why can't we do that same thing, and why can't you have a customer channel for integration and feedback? So these two principles from customer I am and how that's helping to digitally transform a company we're trying to incorporate into our software so that we can get employees more involved in identity and access management and helping to in quotes digitally transform the identity and access management experience within a company.
And perhaps next, next conference, we can talk a little bit about the specifics about that and this particular case here. I just have a little screenshot of one of the biggest problems that, that, you know, every customer talks to me about eventually, or if I ask them, they all have this problem and you probably all have this problem. Microsoft launched active directory win February of 2000. So people have had active directory in place for 17 plus years. Now, most people have no idea who owns what group or what distribution list in active directory. So one of the things we've spent a lot of time in, in testing is the use of bots to basically go out and go out and talk to the employees and say, Hey, you're a member of a particular group. Do you know who the owner is? And then using some machine learning and basically presenting back to, to administrators and saying, Hey, based on all the feedback we've gotten for you and some of the machine learning we've done, and also looking at some of the activity within active directory, we say that, you know, it's probably Jackson who owns this group, or it's Bob that owns this group, or it's Jane that owns this group.
It's an important thing that folks have, have sort of let, let this group pollution happen over the last 17 years. And it's a, it's a blocker in a lot of cases to folks getting to Azure active, direct, we were getting to the cloud in general. So it's, it's one of the things that we think is quite quite interesting. So, you know, my concluding remark here is, is, you know, in some ways I'm kind of shooting myself on the foot. My guys, you know, they will say to you that all the work that we're doing right now, I have one rule or I have more than one rule, but my rule number one for all my guys, when I have them working on these projects is no services required. It doesn't mean that a customer might not want to have a services partner, but no services required.
I don't want a, a product to go out, out the door at our company anymore, where you have to have a, you know, a couple of bus loads of consultants show up to help you get it deployed. So, as I say here, this great quote, I thought was very appropriate. Burn the boats as you enter the island and you will take the island, but you know, we're, we're not arriving in boats, we're arriving in buses. So I thought I would give you this image. This is, this is what I'm trying to achieve, which is burning the buses so that we don't have, you know, these huge amount of consultants that show up and, and, and you guys spending millions of dollars working on these different things. So hopefully I've given you a little insight into some of my thinking about how we need as an industry to digitally transform things. I don't know that we're gonna get there before I retire, but I think based on the number of customers that I've talked to, who are on their second, third, I've got one customer I've worked with now, since I joined zoom it back in 1993, who's now on their fifth identity and access management system. So, you know, if I add up the millions of dollars that folks have spent on this, I'd love to see that number go down in the long run. So with that, thank you. Thank you for your attention.
Thank you very much. Action. One very quick question. Sure. So you showed the example of inter integrating IPAs into that landscape for, for easing the integration and the landscape. This is only a first step in a digital transformation of IM right? So it's, it's opening up. So to say the, the space. Yes. Do you have any more ideas where digital transformation could happen?
Well, I think part of that was what I showed in the, in the, I think it was my second slide around bots and artificial intelligence. Yep. Some of it, I don't want to get too much into cuz it's competitive advantage for us, but okay. Like I said, by this time, next year, I'd love to, to talk more about it. Ah, very interesting. Yeah. But yeah, definitely. There's more, more needs to be done than just that. Okay.
Thank you very much.
Thank you everybody. Thank you. Yeah. You're welcome. Thank
You. There's a break.
