Identity and the Rise of the Platforms

I'll echo what Martin said. It's really wonderful to be here and in front of people and actually meeting with folks. And I'm really excited to talk about this. You know, Bertold mentioned I've been doing this for a couple of years, just to give some context. When I first started at Microsoft, I used to get run out of meetings with customers. When I told them that active directory was required with windows and it would be scalable. And all of these kind of things, time has changed. Now, no one even thinks about that, but I'm gonna set a little bit of context. Do I need a clicker? Yes. I'm gonna set a little bit of context with respect to where I've been and what I've seen over the last little bit to give you some background on kind of what my conclusions are. So let's see if this will work. There we go. So literally, you know, when I first started in this business, I, I mean, even before identity, you know, I worked on a mainframe and the whole era of local area networks was just starting anybody. Remember Banian vines, any hands, few, few gray hairs out there. Yes. A few of us still left.
And you know, the funny thing about it was, you know, as I illustrate here on the slide is that these silos across all these different organizations were, were, were extremely common. And as time went on, we kind of had this whole eruption of, of SAS. And it really started to disrupt a lot of these legacy applications, not just applications that in the old days were on mainframes, but literally everything, you know, the, the business models, the revenue models have all changed. I mean, even in the software industry, we had to go from, you know, perpetual licenses to subscription licenses. A lot of those things have changed, but the only way that in, in, you know, really the last 20 years that we were able to move data from one silo to another was through ETL, which is just basically this, you know, export, transform and load operation.
I'm sure you're familiar with it. We all did it. You exported something from one thing and you did some changes to it and you imported to a different silo. And there was very little API access today. Those silos and their problems continue to exist. Every customer I meet with is still moving things from one system to another. It's gotten a little bit better, you know, know with APIs and some of these things, but what I've certainly seen. And I'm sure you see it is the CX, the customer experience, the user experience, the employee experience are very disjoint across these different silos. There's a lot of APIs, but the problem with having a lot of APIs is then you'd have to start worrying about API managers and API security and proxies and gateways. There's just been an explosion of these tools to protect APIs. The other thing is, you know, again, when I talk to customers is everybody keeps thinking that, that, that Sims are the answer.
We'll just forward all the information to a SIM and we can monitor our security from there. I think that's really great for the cus for the SIM vendors, because a lot of them charged by how much data gets sent into their SIM. So that's, that's pretty good too for them. And I think another, another issue that I've seen with customers where they get particularly frustrated is where vendors are pushing them to move to a cloud version of piece of software. And there's an impedance mismatch between the on-prem version that they're running and the cloud version that they're running. In other words, they're not a hundred percent correct. You can't go from one to the other because it's missing this feature and you basically end up having to more or less turn off the on-prem version and go to a, in quotes, a brand new version in the sky.
It's just, you know, amazingly commonplace. So we're not quite there yet. And, you know, to, to add a point to what Martin was saying, and his key point complexity really is the problem. The world has become increasingly complex for us because of things like what's going on with shadow it. And all of these SAS applications that have, that have come together, new problems have arisen. And I, and I hope you've seen some of these or, or I hope you haven't experienced them, but you've seen them more and more niche, SAS, SAS tools being deployed at customers to address specific pain points. The number of applications literally has exploded and employee collaborations and workflows are very splintered. I, I literally almost can't go a week without seeing another vendor who's putting yet another workflow engine inside their product. How many workflow engines do we need in the enterprise, right?
And when you come right down to it, it's really hard now to find the business core. Where is the business core in the company? Is it in this application that application, these four applications, these 12 applications, all these different databases. It's, it's really a difficult thing. And I, I want to give you one stat from an Analyst company, which I thought was really interesting is they said through 20, 25, more than 99% of cloud breaches. So pretty much all cloud breaches will have a root cause of customer misconfiguration or MIS mistake, right? And this is just an example of the complexity that we've driven into the organization because of, of all these different applications. In fact, I think it's this explosion of complexity is really beyond a human ability to, to manage it. So even though there are great solutions coming out, you know, SAS, security, posture, posture management, the cloud identity, entitlement management, things like that. It's, it's not enough. In fact, in some ways, those things are even more complex. And while all this has been happening, something else is happening at the board level. And at the CXO level, it's called digital transformation or digital journey. We're really trying to at these companies that are going through this unlock employee and customer value to reduce friction and have a more seamless experience.
One of the things that, that we see is how organizations are trying to have an explicit connection and alignment across all their teams. And to Martin's point when he was talking about, you know, an aligned it and, and secure it. That's one of the key things that they're trying to do. I think in a lot of organizations is have this alignment across the whole organization. And it's really difficult to have that with so many different tools. The other thing that I am starting to see more and more customers talk about, or even at the edge of implementation, and some customers are really implementing these things is low code and no code platforms with the goal of bringing everyone in the organization into it. You want to change a workflow. You want to change a process. You want to build something to automate something, let's get the business involved in it.
It's not just it, that has to do anything. So if you can unlock some of that value, it brings a lot of energy into an organization and helps with the digital transformation and in bringing people into the overall company from a strategic perspective. The other thing too is less reliance on outside, you know, contractors or consultants. We see this time and time again in every organization, no matter what the project is, you bring people in, they do their work, they hand it over to you, they leave, and then you're calling them back in again and again and again, because there has been no knowledge exchange or insufficient knowledge exchange your workers change. So these low code, no code business platforms are something that I think we'll see more and more of.
So the, the interesting thing I've noticed, and this happened probably three or four years ago, about three years ago, was where customers starting to talk to me about, could you make your application, the interface look like this other interface? And I would ask questions to the customer. Well, why do you want it to look like that? And they said, well, because we are using this platform for our whole company. And we would like our people to see one unified or have one unified experience. And that's where I started thinking about this. So when I was preparing for this, for this presentation or thinking about this presentation, you know, a, a lot of things have happened over the last year. And I, I kind of wanted to, to put into my brain who has the potential of having one of these business platforms, also what I call the best of the suite.
And there's a number of companies here. And I don't, I don't know how much you know about some of these companies, but when you actually go, and if you, if you have an opportunity, you're interested in this check some of their websites. If you look at what Atlasian is doing, if you look at what service now is doing, if you look at what Zoho is doing, they're building a platform, a business platform, low code, dynamic workflow engines, unified data, a placed to be able to expand your business on. There are some really good companies that have a lot of potential there. And I've, I've, I've written down a few of them along with some recent acquisitions that they've done, which is just my view on, on how they're moving more towards these business platforms. I think there was a couple of really interesting acquisitions that Okta just made a little while ago.
And it really struck me when I saw this quote in Forbes from Todd McKinnon about he, how he wants to be one of the, you know, cloud vendors that people think about. And I actually think that that, that, that Todd and Okta eventually want to become a business platform. And to my point about yet another workflow engine, they just bought a workflow engine. So again, it just shows how some of these companies are trying to do this. And I, I put doubtful for Amazon simply because if you think about what Amazon does, Amazon is very much of a compute platform. That's what they're interested in. They're interested in selling compute resources for the customer. So what I'm trying to, to give to you is what I think is this rise of the platform that's going to come out of this. And if you've been around for a while, you will have seen this in the past and on my next slide, I'll talk to you a little bit about how this happened in the past.
So what is this platform about the platform is about working smarter and faster. It's about delivering, engaging experiences across your business, to your partners, to your customers, to your employees. It's about automating work for everyone. And it's about connecting the enterprise, right? It's about pulling everyone in the business, into the strategy for the company. In a lot of cases, we've talked in the past about how identity has to work with the business. This is very much the business working with everyone inside the company. It's not just about identity. And I think one of the key things, you know, we talked or Martin was just talking about, this is having this common plane with a lot of these capabilities already baked into the business platform that you're using, whether it's security, whether it's identity, whether it's entitlement management, whether it's governance, having all of that as a single set of capabilities as part of a business platform.
So the rise of the platform, my belief generally is that the pendulum is swinging towards best of suite SaaS solutions from business platforms like at Lacey ServiceNow in Zoho, not today, maybe not tomorrow, but I think over the next five years or so, you're gonna see more and more capabilities built into these platforms. And more and more companies gravitating the building of their digital transformation and their strategy, their digital journey on one of these platforms, there is huge trapped value at the intersection of technology and employ employee engagement. When you can get the technology, enabling all of the employees in an organization, and you can get all of the employees in an organization, rowing the boat in more or less the same direction, you are going to go a lot further than having all of these disjointed capabilities across your company. I do believe that SAS best of breed solutions will eventually face very tough, best of sweet competition.
What do I mean that by that as an example, so a lot of the customers I talk to because, well, it's a, it's a lens that I look through because I'm in, I'm an identity governance vendor. They want integration with their GRC product, whatever they're using today for go governance, risk and compliance. So I think what we'll see is platforms like ServiceNow, which already has a governance risk and compliance capability, but other platforms building that capability in, and eventually companies wondering why they're purchasing standalone products. And if, if you've been around for a while, you saw the early days of identity management where people would buy a point tool from zoom at where I used to work, or in those days, you know, all the other kinds of identity vendors that were out there, most of which aren't there now anymore. And we swung to a best of suite where you would go to perhaps it was an Oracle or a Nobel or someone else.
And you would buy a suite of identity tools. Well, I believe that the same is going to happen again, except from a SAS perspective. Instead of everyone buying a identity governance product and an identity management product from a different vendor and a password management product from yet a different vendor, we'll see a swing of the pendulum to the SAS best of breed platform. And again, if you look at some of these platform vendors, you'll see that they either have already released components that do that or that they've got intentions on it. And when you think of vendors like Okta and some of the other vendors that are out there, Microsoft who are just acquired cloud NOx, for example, you see them building that same platform. I don't know if that's what their actual intent is, but when I look at it through what I'm seeing, that's kind of what the conclusion I'm coming to.
And I think the last thing is identity becoming more of a plat platform service, not a series of add-ons. In other words, it's dial tone and you can definitely see that in, in what Microsoft is trying to achieve. You can see that when you think about Okta and what Todd McKinnon said about his, his designs on being a cloud platform of choice in the future, and you can certainly see it in vendors like ServiceNow and in some of the other vendors I mentioned. So moving away from perhaps purchasing more of these individual identity products and relying more on the identity capabilities, the dial tone that's built into the platform. That's it. Thank you.