We expect an efficiency push in identity access management. So, and one of the things I observe is, is we see a lot of innovation around workflows and, and low code, no code. And it's always interesting, you know, I'm, I'm watching as an Analyst, I'm watching these industries for so many years. And when, when a couple of vendors start telling me about their creative inventions at the same point of time and all are telling me roughly the same, then I think it's a trend. It's a clear trend. I had this around this, and I'm very, very happy to have checks and show with us here who is at clear sky. Welcome Checkon
Thank you. And season greetings to everybody.
So, so what's, what is your perspective on that? It might be a little bit biased given that that clear sky is building on, on top of service now platform, but yeah, at the end of the day, I think you have a very clear perspective on the need for that. And also why you believe that this will be a trend.
Well, you know, at the end of the day, it's, it's funny. I didn't think of it this way. When I first, you know, was looking at clear sky a couple years ago, but recently I have been because I just seek customers struggling with like, if I just take it from a, you know, a totally identity perspective, I see customers struggling and vendors struggling with things like, you know, dev ops and Kubernetes and horizontal scaling and vertical scaling, you know, and data center politics. Should we have a data center in Europe? How many data centers should we have in Europe? How many data centers in north America, where would we put our next data center? And one of the things I, I mean, to me, that's like worrying about how your gasoline is blended in your car, right? Does it have this, does it have that?
Does it have the other, this one's got, you know, cleaner in it and this one doesn't have cleaner. I mean, who cares? You shouldn't have to worry about that. So from a, just a general efficiency perspective as a vendor, one of the things I love is basically passing on all of that efficiency to my customer. You don't have to worry about any of those things because it's all being handled by the platform below it. That's at my perspective from a vendor. And then from a customer perspective, I, I, I think the key things that, you know, we've been seeing and, and, you know, genuinely, both surprised and happy to see is the fact that more and more customers are realizing that with work from home and zero trust and some of these other capabilities and identity security, to be honest, also, right, as we were saying earlier in the, in the, in, in the speaking lineup, you know, identities at the center of most cyber hacks these days, whether it's cracked passwords or bad passwords or lack of passwords, or what have you, or found passwords.
And a lot of customers are looking at questions like how can I get more productivity outta my staff? And, you know, I kind of look at it as, as a, you know, if, if we worked day in and day out in only, let's take two for an example, Microsoft office or the Google suite, if all I had to do was all my work in either of those packages, my daily job would be relatively easy, right? The switching from, you know, word to outlook to Excel is pretty straightforward. It's over the last 10 years where so many new SAS products have come out and so many companies are using so many SaaS products. There's a ton of context switching, that's going on with employees, right? I gotta be on Salesforce one minute. I've gotta be on work work the next minute I've gotta be on, you know, something else the next minute.
And there is a drive to make people more efficient in their daily job. And one of those things, not just, you know, things like passwords, but one of those things is less context switching. So, you know, we're particularly excited to see customers gravitating towards business platforms that allow that. And, you know, I'm always very specific in saying while I have a lot of respect for what, you know, Microsoft Azure is, or, or, or Amazon AWS, those aren't business platforms, they're compute platforms. So, you know, my general view is over the next five years, seeing more of these business platforms, AKA things like ServiceNow and ATLA and JIRA potentially, excuse me, Salesforce. And even something like a Workday become more of a business platform that people can start centralizing more of their employees around to increase productivity. Of course, that also means the platforms have to add those capabilities in. And I, I think at this point, ServiceNow is the, is the most advanced, but you can see where people are trying to do this with, with, with platforms. I mean, even Okta, you just have to look at quotes from Todd McKinnon and, and, and you, you would follow exactly what he's trying to do is to build a business platform on Okta. So I think it's gonna be a big push over that to
You.
Yes. Jackson,
Can I, where I agree with a lot of what you said, but where would that leave? For example, office 365, if people are looking for a business platform that, for example, like you say, ServiceNow is developing the whole time, right. Do you think people will start switching away from 365 or
No? No. I mean, look, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll say one thing from a historical perspective, you know, if you go back many, many, many years ago, when I first started in this business, I think it might have been Kim Cameron who came up with the, this was yada yet another directory and I'll leave what the, a stands for. And there was a big push, you know, in the, in the nineties and into the early two thousands to eliminate directories. And I think the biggest thing that we kept saying to people was, look, if you've got 14 directories internally and you get to seven, that's a huge win. If you've got seven and you get to three, that's a huge win getting to one, probably not gonna happen. So I feel kind of the same way Paul, to answer your question, you know, with respect to, you know, workplace, you know, business packages that, you know, we've got way too many interfaces, way, too many help systems way too many phone calls to make when we have problems during the day and getting from 15 of these or 85 of them, that there, that there are today, perhaps in a company down to, you know, 25 or whatever is, is gonna be hugely beneficial.
And then I think, you know, on the prediction side, one last point, I mean, who says that Microsoft doesn't acquire a service now, you know, in the future or, you know, something along that line. I mean, it's within the realm of possibility.
Yeah. And, and I think going back to our prediction, I think what, what you talked about is the platform aspect. And that is part of where I see a potential for efficiency. I see a lot of interesting announcements from various windows around new types of workflow capabilities. And interesting point is that these workflow capabilities commonly are not sort of. So when I go back and, and projection, we have been in this space so long and workflows were always tailor made for certain ITA and identity management, exactly use cases. And that is really from, from what I see fundamentally changing these workflows are low-code local and they are built to integrate with everything they are going well beyond this idea of, I have this in my provisioning tool, I have this life cycle. They, they think about a broader perspective about way more use case. And I think this is what we are seeing to evolve, where we have the, the first first sort of approaches out and where, where, when I talk with vendors, I see the next arriving very soon.
And that also helps us then in automation and doing things better. And we have for integration, we have better standards. So, so you and me, we have following PMML from the very beginning. It took a little, but some whatever, 15 years later or so with skim in its current release, we are there where we have a standard that helps us in integration and, and helps us also in, in automation of a lot of things. And this is why I personally believe that we are, we have a huge opportunity for being more efficient. I actually management, which we should leverage in 2022.
Well, one, one thing I'll just throw, throw on there, cuz you did mention workflow and, and I'd forgot to mention it, but I think it's hugely important. I mean, it really is amazing to me. And I've, you know, again, been doing this for so long, you know, in zoom at days we had to teach people Zs script, you know, and then at Microsoft days we had to teach 'em something else and you know, just on and on and on. And this is really amazing to see somebody who knows service now to sit down in front of, you know, the, the service now developer workflow interface and all of the functions available for an identity governance product around setting up work, setting up connections and requests and all this kind of jazz is all right there in the same interface. So you don't need to, you know, once you've done your PhD in vendor a you don't need to go out and do a PhD in vendor B. Right? Yeah. And I think that's one of the huge efficiencies that I want to see end up in IGA, as opposed to what you're you're you just mentioned at the start, which was all the IGA vendors going out and buying their own workflow package. Right. Or their own user access request package. Yeah. But,
But, but I, but I think, you know, when these things are no code local and they are easy, they're good in consuming all the APIs of the other things that we are making huge brokers.
