SailPoint’s Ben Bulpett gets to know our new EVP of EMEA Steve Bradford, and why Steve decided to join the #SailPointCrew!

Video Transcript

Ben Bulpett: Hello and welcome to Identity Talks. My name is Ben Bulpett and I’m the EMEA Marketing Director here at SailPoint and today I’m joined by Steve Bradford our new SVP for EMEA. Good morning Steve and welcome to Identity Talks.

Steve Bradford: Well thank you Ben and a pleasure to be here.

Ben Bulpett: So Steve you’ve been with the company now I think two months, do you want to give everyone who joins these talks a bit of background about yourself, where you’ve come from and your experience?

Steve Bradford: Okay sure um well I’ve been in the industry 30 years and um if I go back to the very beginning I joined IBM as an 18-year-old fresh out of high school. They paid for me to do some more exams and I moved around different departments uh in the early phases of that career. Probably about in my early 20’s I decided I want to be a salesperson and so I went off and uh I went through the IBM sales school and went up through the ranks, spent the vast majority of my time there in the software division and the pinnacle of that was really leading the Tivoli division, which was um across northern

Europe. And actually, that was my first sort of foray into the identity management space.

Ben Bulpett: Wow Tivoli that a shows your age there Stevie, a few of us will remember the Tivoli days. And who have you worked with since obviously IBM? I know you know you and I’ve crossed paths and with Salesforce and SAP are a couple but you want to share with us some other experiences you’ve got?

Steve Bradford: Well the last decade has really been pretty exciting in the industry and specifically you know I’ve had the, the privilege of working some, for some pretty incredible companies. I was on the European leadership team of Salesforce, the same at ServiceNow and then I ran the operation at a company called Automation Anywhere. So, I’ve sat in the CRM space in the sort of the workflow space and uh and also in the robotic process automation area. And really I’ve picked those companies because I thought they were in the most exciting bits of our industry and I think that was proven to be the case actually.

Ben Bulpett: Excellent, so what attracted you to SailPoint? So you’ve been around so give us a how did you join us and what was the, the process and what’s your impressions of the company?

Steve Bradford: Well so just sort of extending that sort of leadership sort of position of those last three companies it was exactly what I was looking for you know again. And with SailPoint I saw an organization that sits at the top right hand of the Gartner quadrant in terms of thought leadership and execution um but doesn’t have the market share in exactly the same way that Salesforce didn’t when I when I joined it. And really my excitement about joining the company was that actually yeah, it’s a, it’s a hot topic in the industry, we are thought leaders and we have all of that market share to go and win and I think we have the ability to do that. So that was number one. Number two was um given the right opportunity for the job which was working for a company looking to grow it’s EMEA footprint, looking for somebody to come in and build that strategy and, and be given the opportunity to go and execute that strategy. So, for me that was really important to have that remit and then lastly and all of these are as important as each other was joining a company that had the right culture, the right set of values and for me that’s incredibly important. What I’m delighted to say is having been here two months um what I was told is what I’ve now experienced and seen um in all of those respects but specifically around uh the culture and the values that the people have here.

Ben Bulpett: Excellent, great to hear and you know could you give people just a view on your plans for the business over the next few uh months and years?

Steve Bradford: Well with one of the things about being in, in lockdown when you join a company is that you become incredibly efficient. So, I’m probably a month or two ahead of where I thought I would be in terms of my onboarding. The European leadership team which Ben you sit on, has already met several times looking at building out our strategy for the future and some of that is very short-term in terms of what’s the structure, um you know what is the most efficient way for us to go to market? What do we want to be focusing on? And we’ve already gone through some of that and, and core markets will be absolutely at the front of that strategy as we move forward. Some of it is much longer-term steps that we need to take um in terms of you know how do we develop people? How does the marketing function look especially in the shape of you know a new tomorrow with um the way the world is at the moment? But I’m very, very happy to say that we have really moved through that process very efficiently. I think we’ve got the first outline of a three, five-year strategy for Europe and we’ll be putting the first elements of that in place come the first of July.

Ben Bulpett: Steve it’s been a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you so much for joining Identity Talks and again welcome to SailPoint.

Steve Bradford: Thanks very much Ben.

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