Welcome to the KuppingerCole Analysts Chat. I'm your host. My name is Matthias Reinwarth, I'm the director of the Practice IAM here at KuppingerCole Analysts. And talking of IAM, my guest today is Nitish Deshpande. He is the author of the upcoming or now published Leadership Compass around IGA. Hi Nitish, good to have you.
Hi, Matthias. Thanks for having me.
Yeah, great to have you. I mentioned that, you just took over the role of creating the Leadership Compass and it's just called IGA. I remember earlier versions covered different segments of the topic IGA. So what constitutes IGA today? What's the definition of IGA as a market segment when you started writing your Leadership Compass? Absolutely.
I can elaborate on that. So IGA as Identity Governance and Administration converts to increasingly integrated Identity Lifecycle Management and Access Governance markets. Today, what we saw is that there are still some organizations either looking at replacements of User Access Provisioning, Identity Lifecycle Management or Identity and Access Governance. But most are opting for a comprehensive IGA solution to tackle risks originating from inefficient Access Governance features and what we're also seeing is one of the adoption patterns in the market is a managed service achieving a fulfillment through Identity Lifecycle Management. And Access Governance is run by within the organization itself to retain absolute control on all access governace features. In most of the cases where there is a need for both, IGA products are preferred over provisioning or governance only solutions to achieve a desired mix of ILM and Access Governance capabilities. So that's what we have tried to cover in this report over the market and the changes that it is happening right now.
I'm doing Identity and Access Management for quite a while and the IGA market is around for quite a while as well. It has changed over time. We have covered cloud and on premises separately before, but overall IGA is a topic that's around for quite a while. Why is it so important now? Why does it require an IGA Leadership Compass as of now?
Why is it so important?
Absolutely. It's it's been around for a while and it's ever evolving. Every year we're seeing new changes. And Identity Lifecycle Management remains core IAM component. But Access Governance is becoming a more sought out feature, a capability, you can say. For organizations requiring better visibility of identity administration and access entitlements across it’s IT infrastructure. And I think IGA concerns the capabilities in a market that broadly deal with end to end lifecycle management.
You know, then you have access entitlements, then management of policies, workflows, roles as well as access certifications and then you have other things like the segregation of duties, risk analysis, auditing as well as some access intelligence features for business credit insights and all of these come together and help in making an effective decision and potentially enhance the governance of the organization.
So this topic remains to be relevant and important, and that's what we are trying to highlight in this report as well.
And I think many organizations are now facing real legal regulatory requirements that need such a tool just to meet these requirements. When you created that report, what was your main focus? Was there a specific market segment to focus on or was it a broader perspective?
Yeah. So when we started creating this report a few months back, the primary focus remained on vendors that offer both, Identity Lifecycle Management and Access Governance capabilities either as a common product or simply kind of like an integrable product component and the help to deliver capabilities across IGA complete spectrum. And as I mentioned before, we have seen new adoption trends.
Then also we have changing customer priorities and deployment patterns. So we decided on this Leadership Compass with a holistic approach. And I would say this report you can see focuses and helps the security leaders to identify the relevant IAM priorities and subsequently shortlist the appropriate vendors who will fulfill their IAM priorities.
Right. When you said you looked at the broader market of all the vendors that provide services across these two segments that you said, so Identity Lifecycle Management plus Access Governance, there have been many changes in the market, but is it a growing market or to put it easily, how many vendors have you had to look at?
It's definitely a growing market. We are seeing new compared to last year's report, if you take for example, we have 12% new vendors in this report alone. And in the last year's report there were, I think, more than 25% more vendors compared to the other previous year. So this is an evergreen market. New vendors are coming into this IGA space with, I would say, innovative features.
So the focus also of this report was looking at the innovation of each vendor, what kind of features they're providing, what is their future roadmap? Are they are they considered complying or satisfying the requirements of the customers and the future requirements? For example, one of the other things which we are seeing in this report is more and more incorporation of AI and machine learning.
So that has been also one of the areas that we have tried to address this report and highlight if any vendors specialized in these features. So definitely this market is growing and once the report is published, I think the viewers can definitely see who are the vendors, who are the leaders. I would say in my opinion, all 25 are leaders that are in this report, they are really good.
But when you put all 25 of the best leaders, the best vendors in one place, someone is going to come out on top, someone will be at the bottom, but that's how it is. But I think it will definitely give a good insight in the IGA market.
Absolutely. And as we always say, when it comes to Leadership Compasses, these evaluations that we do, they are based on generic criteria that you applied during your research that can be different for an organization that is looking for their own solution, for solving their own requirements and their own challenges. So using the metrics that you provide and applying your own a) common sense, b) requirements from organization might lead to different results.
So that is of importance. And we use your market data, your research data also for advisory purposes to make sure that we identify the right solution. Just because the solution is in the upper right corner of some metrics does not mean that it's the perfect one for you. So otherwise the decision would be very easy. Unfortunately, it is not.
When we look at the market participants that you've mentioned, are these the usual suspects? Are these the One Identitys ForgeRocks in the world or are there new names? How does this market, what does this market comprise of?
Yeah. So in the IGA market what we have seen is a combination of both. So we have the traditional players, the ones, as you mentioned, One Identity, others like SailPoint. But we also have a few new vendors coming into the space and they have surprised us with their innovation. So that was one of the reasons they are included in this report.
And once the report is out, I think everybody would like to find out who are these new vendors. And so we tried to give a very neutral approach to everyone, as we always do. And it's a quite easy report to go through because for example, we have also tried to map out strengths and challenges of every vendor.
And as you mentioned, maybe one customer wants a requirement which could be one vendor’s strength, would be another’s challenge. So it could be a mix of both. But I think we have tried to cover as much as possible in this market in this report.
Although this is a mature market and you're covering that for the first time and and building on the work of Richard, who did the recent edtion of this document and Martin. So it's an update. Nevertheless it was a full new research. Was there something striking that you came across when it comes to what the market delivers and where the trends are leading to?
Yes, as you mentioned, this was my first time making this report. And for me, one of the things that was striking was the innovation in all the vendors. For me, all the vendors are really involved in innovation and trying to,... they have a very defined roadmap for the next 12 to 24 months, and it's filled with innovation.
So that was also very encouraging to see that there is IGA market still growing and this possibility for new features, new capabilities, addressing multiple requirements. So that was definitely fascinating as well. So I had a great time analyzing all the vendors and coming to a solution. I hope our readers can go through it and can refer to it as further requirements.
Absolutely. And if there are any questions regarding that topic or regarding the podcast in general, or if you want to suggest topics for this podcast, but if you have specific questions towards this Leadership Compass, please leave your questions. When you're watching this on YouTube, just leave it in the comments section. We have a look at that and we will get back to you.
If you are listening to this in the audio version on the podcatcher of your choice, there will be the show notes where there is contact information where you can reach out to us or just go to the website kuppingercole.com and and reach out to Nitish or me. And while you're there, try to have a 30 days test subscription or just do the regular subscription, which is really affordable.
Have a look at the Leadership Compass IGA as provided by Nitish. This is a great read and it covers all of what we've talked about and so much more so. And I assume Nitish, it was quite an amount of work right?
Definitely. I mean, we involve very extensive analysis on all kinds of capabilities of every kind of vendor. So I hope our viewers can go through it and find it insightful for their requirements.
Absolutely. So thank you very much. First for your effort for creating that document and second, for being my guest today and sharing your insights into the creation and the results of the Leadership Compass IGA that just has been published. So reach out to our website, reach out to Nitish and me in case of any questions and I am looking forward to having you soon in a second episode.
Thank you Nitish for being my guest for the first time today.
Thank you so much for having me and looking forward to the next round.
Thanks and bye bye
