At the Helm: Navigating New Identity Challenges

By Mark McClain CEO and Founder

Last month, at the DEMO conference in Palm Springs, we unveiled our company and launched our new Compliance IQ product. The launch received excellent reviews, which has a lot to do with how we're helping organizations reduce risk and add more meaningful business context to identity governance, risk and compliance (GRC) processes.

First off, why are we here?

To be honest, after a successful run with Waveset and then Sun, I just wasn't ready to sail off into the identity management sunset (pun fully intended). When Waveset first launched back in 1999, I knew identity management would be big – but I didn't realize just how big. As the market developed, I saw how broad and deep the challenges could be, and how many vendors and products emerged to address them. The identity space still has lots of room for improvement, and once again I see a new set issues that promises to be just as challenging and interesting as the last round, if not more so!

The problem is that most of today's identity management tools deployed today were engineered six to seven years ago (some by the team from Waveset). Those products, such as provisioning and access management, do what they were designed to do very well, but they simply weren't intended to provide the analytical framework to address today's identity GRC requirements – a painful and laborious process for most large organizations.

Charting a New Course

New challenges require new tools – along with long-term vision and proven experience. So, I gathered our SailPoint crew together and set a new course with a team that has systems management DNA from Tivoli, deep identity experience from Waveset and pioneering expertise in relational databases – the perfect combination of skills to address today's emerging identity compliance challenges.

The first thing SailPoint will do is bring more automation, visualization and intelligence to identity GRC via Compliance IQ. But we won't stop there. We've got our sights set on doing for identity management what business intelligence and analytics did for sales, marketing and supply chain management. Using identity intelligence, SailPoint will help all kinds of organizations make more strategic, high-impact decisions that optimize their business performance related governance, risk management and compliance initiatives.

I hope you find our first edition of the SailPoint newsletter interesting and informative. The team and I look forward to working with you on the adventure ahead.

Bon voyage,
Mark