SailPoint’s CTO, Asanka Jayasuriya has held leadership roles at many companies, including InVision, Atlassian and Amazon. In this interview, we hear why he joined SailPoint and what his vision is for his role as CTO.

Video Transcript

Hannah Giles: Good morning everyone, welcome to another episode of Identity Talks. Today I’m joined by SailPoint CTO Asanka Jayasuriya and Asanka recently joined us from Envision and has held leadership roles at companies like Atlassian and Amazon and today we’re just gonna learn a little more about who Asanka is and why he joined SailPoint. So Asanks welcome.

Asanka Jayasuriya: Thank you. 

Hannah Giles: Yeah uh, I guess our first question is what drew you to SailPoint? You have a lot of really interesting tech leadership roles so what led you here? 

Asanka Jayasuriya: Yeah that’s a great question, I’ve been involved in software development particularly SaaS I guess for about 20 years and you know over that time walking through several different companies the thing that resonated the most with me is to really join values driven companies. And those are companies where you know the values of how a company operates, how it interacts with its employees, with its customers are really foundational in the business and SailPoint really emphasizes that with the Four I’s that are part of their core drivers for their values of how the company operates and that’s been very clear. The other major thing obviously is just the rapidly growing space that the company’s part of. Identity and governance is so important as, especially now, as more and more companies are moving to the cloud. I just saw the opportunity to build some really great products with a really great team.

Hannah Giles: Yeah that’s so true and I worked at SailPoint for five years and I also feel that way about our values, so I think that’s so interesting that, that seems to be a common link between people that join SailPoint. So, I guess let’s go back to that cloud comment. You said something the other day that was interesting to me, you said the identity problem is shifting to a cloud problem. So, is that part of your kind of vision and your role and what, what does that really mean?

Asanka Jayasuriya: Yeah SailPoint has, is the market leader in governance with our IIQ product you know built over the last decade really and is the clear leader. But what we’re seeing in the industry today is much a very rapid shift from on-premise applications to cloud applications and you know CIOs and IT departments are now having to provision applications in the cloud and provision them quickly. A new generation of worker, they want the best in breed SaaS tools and they want them available quickly and the needs of IT to then govern those applications haven’t changed so there’s a huge opportunity for a company and team like ours with deep, deep experience and governance to bring that capability to the cloud so that IT departments can quickly respond to users’ needs for new applications, get them provisioned with the best tools but still maintain that governance to ensure that their business remains secure and compliant.

Hannah Giles: Yeah it’s, it’s really that perfect mix of security and efficiency and compliance we’re seeing that across the board so that’s, that’s pretty compelling. Well thank you so much for sharing that with us today and we look forward to having you on again soon.

Asanka Jayasuriya: Thanks for having me.

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