Gartner IAM Summit

Gartner IAM. Woo woo. What a good time.

It’s a great time. It’s always a great time.

It is fun. We have fun.

Hello.

I’m going to ask you some questions about it.

All right, fire away.

I mean, to start, what’s Gartner IAM ?

Well, from my perspective, I’ll let Javed talk from PMA side, but from a PMM side, it’s the preeminent identity and access management event that happens every year. So if you want to know what’s going on in the IAM space and what the trends are, what the emerging technologies are, where the market industry is going, you go to this event. And it’s been like that since I’ve entered the IAM space about 20 years ago. It’s also a good opportunity for me to go check out and see what some of my competitors are doing.

Yeah. Like Rob said, yes, absolutely. It’s a gathering place, annual gathering place of all things identity. Identity professionals, vendors, customers, and of course analysts. It’s also a place to discover stuff. There’s a lot of discovery going on every single day. And I think as much as we are learning from what the analysts are thinking about their research, I believe that the analysts are learning from us as well. Especially the one-on-one sessions where you put an arcane requirement from a bunch of customers you heard about in front of an analyst, you put them in a deep think mode, right? So it’s really useful. And it obviously works the other way where the analyst will drop some piece of information. This quote comes to mind, “You’re either orchestrating or you’re being orchestrated.” Remarkable in my opinion because that’s kind of the drift we’ve been on here at 1Kosmos for a while now, really trying to make things easier and add value on top of passwordless, add security to passwordless. So really important Session held once a year.

We liked Texas. Texas was Fun.

And now it’s going to be in Texas apparently. So used to the Vegas life-

And we had a booth.

But that’s history. All good.

We had a booth.

We loved Texas, yeah.

We had great conversations and engagement, but why and where does 1Kosmos fit into this event?

Yeah, it’s a good question. Again, from my perspective, and Javed, you may have a different one. But there’s a lot of trends that are taking place within our industry right now. One of those is passwordless, right? And another one is actually identity verification, funny enough. How to prove an identity online. And being that we play in both of those spaces and is really the only vendor to bring both of those capabilities together, we fit into that space quite nicely. If we look at just a lot of the conversations, Abigail, you were in the booth. When we talked about what we did, it aligned very well to what customers were trying to solve. Especially when we brought into the fact that they came in looking for passwordless.

We say, “Oh, by the way we do that is building a verified identity so you can ensure you know the user behind the device.” And at the end of the day, that’s what people are trying to do. There’s lots of technologies that are laying on top to try to make that happen, but at the end of the day, what we bring to the table is a concept of, and it’s one of the things that Akif talked about, is this concept of identity plus selfie. Is it identity plus selfie? ID plus selfie, yeah, thank you. To ensure you know who that user is by the device. So if you combine the identity, I did it again, the ID plus selfie, you end up on a path that puts you in a position of security that hasn’t been available until 1Kosmos, to be frank.

And when customers see it, and this event for us was better than the last time we were there because the market continues to evolve and people are starting to understand what we’re doing. It’s a very interesting conversation and one in which we are leading the conversation in, which is also fun. We had a couple of people show up at our booth because of Javed, talked about meeting with the analysts, they met with a couple of analysts. They’re looking to do some specific things and they left that meeting and came directly to our booth to learn more because we’re the only ones that can do an IAL or AAL level two certified authentication. Nobody else can do that. We’re the only ones that can do that. So it’s a very different conversation for us than I think it is from some of the other people that are attending that show. Right Javed? What do you think?

Absolutely, we have to be there. We’re going to educate the market about how to do Passwordless correctly, Passwordless securely. We are the only NIST certified IAL2 authenticator on the planet. We have to be there. We are the ones who are helping educate the market. The analysts are learning from us and they’re kind of repeating a little bit of our sentiment now. It has picked up that construct of ID plus selfie, it’s something we’ve been saying for four years now. It’s been on our website for three years now.

You do passwordless because you know who the person is, not who the device is. That’s the right way to do passwordless. Every other exhibitor in the passwordless space prefers to use final authentication, bring a device. Well, we demonstrated we could use seven touch IDs on one phone to unlock a demo. That’s not knowing the identity to open the demo. That’s knowing the device and that’s a shared device. That’s not how we do it. So I think it’s really important for us to be there and for this, I guess, dissemination of information that we are very good at. And I think the market’s really not very good at it yet because it’s still learning.

Love that. What would you say in terms of all these conversations that happened in our booth, did anything throw you off? Any questions or unique conversations that really stuck, that felt different than our typical conversations at these types of events?

For me, the big one, as I mentioned, we had an organization come straight to our booth after talking with one of the analysts. They were curious about what a digital identity wallet was. “Tell me about how that works.” And that’s not typically a question we get. Normally it’s like, “Tell me how you do passwordless.” Or, “Tell me how you do identity verification.” But the concept of an identity wallet may not be new. The way in which we deliver it, certainly is. And they were interested in the way we bring all of that together.

How do we build that wallet? What’s behind it? What’s the supporting technologies for us to make that work? The fact that we can support the concept of bring your own identity was a very hot button for them. And they spent about an hour in our booth learning more about our technology and how all of this stuff comes together. And that conversation didn’t happen the last time we were at this show because customers just didn’t quite understand it. But the market is moving such that it’s evolving so quickly that we’re starting to have those conversations now. That’s a big one for me.

Yeah, and I would agree obviously, and for me it was interesting. Folks are showing up at these events. The IRS was there, Costco was there, so many different large companies. Navy Federal was there. Folks are taking a look at what they’ve been doing for the last 20, 30 years, which has been the paper-based onboarding of new hires, whether they’re full-time or they are contractors. It’s interesting how they are suddenly looking to digitize everything as if that’s going to be possible. But there is this impossible dream. Everyone comes up in shows, “Well, my help desk receives a phone call. Can you digitize that for me? I do this manually and it’s a process. Can you digitize that for me?” Those are impossible problems to solve as the technology in the phones and the onboard biometrics with your laptops and all. The state-of-the-art doesn’t support the impossible use cases, but folks are asking the question anyway, and I think that’s a good thing.

It’s not a bad thing just because it’s an impossible or a difficult problem to solve, doesn’t make it a bad thing. It means that there are discussions happening behind closed doors and the doors have opened. Now those discussions are in our booths, and I think that’s where you tend to get that expansion of that circle, that knowledge domain, which is just starting to happen. I did not get questions like that in the last Gartner event, but this time around there were questions like that, and of course there were difficult answers to those and sometimes there was comfortable silence as well. Where everybody realized, “Well, I just asked an impossible question,” but they’re there. They have your number and I feel that can lead to only good things. So that was kind of a standup for me because it was different.

I mean, great conversations, unique questions. What overall, sessions, booth, other vendors being there, the analysts that were present, the attendees walking around, what are your overall thoughts of how this event went?

Well, again, for me, this is the first event I’ve been to since, not that I want to say that word again, but COVID, right? It’s the first time that I’ve been on a show floor in three years almost. So it was good just to get back out and meet people face-to-face. Not to mention, I mean, listen, this is a very small space. It’s fun to see past coworkers and past customers that you’ve worked at or with at other companies that you may have been part of. But at the end of the day, there’s always takeaways. There’s always things that you’re going to learn.

And this event is absolutely no exception to that. And it’s a very beneficial show if you can get there. There are lots of things that you are going to learn no matter how experienced you are. There’s always going to be something that is going to make you stop and think about whatever you just saw, watched, heard, whatever that might be. It’s always a great event. There’s always things that I’m learning, whether it be from customers or from analysts or even some of the other vendors around the show floor, but it’s always a very good event and always a very good time. Always time very well invested going to it.

It was good to catch up with friends from, what, 20 years? Folks still in the business. You enter this industry, you don’t leave it because it’s the identity business, as we said in the session, we are truly the only providers of our own identity. Hopefully people are starting to learn that, understand that. That’s been our value prop for nearly half a decade now. The analysts are starting to speak what we are speaking and imagine meeting all of those individuals, those folks at the same place. I was quite pleased with the venue, to be honest. I was not sure what to expect after Vegas.

Yeah, I was too.

But it was good.

I think it’s better than Vegas, personally.

I liked it. At the Gaylord in Grapevine.

Yep.