Learn about some of the latest patents from SailPoint with Matt Domsch.

Visit our patent page to see a list of all the technology we have created.

Video Transcript

Natalie Reina: I’m Natalie Reina with Identity Talks, and if you’ve been following SailPoint for the past couple of years, you’ve probably noticed that we are taking a renewed sense of ownership over our inventions. I’m with SailPoint’s Vice President Lead Corporate Architect Matt Domsch and today we’re going to get a peek behind the scenes of our patent program. Matt, how does our patent program fit within our culture at SailPoint?

Matt Domsch: Sure. So innovation is a big part of SailPoint’s culture. On the first day at work, you learn about our four Is: innovation, integrity, impact and individuals and we revisit those, you know, often in our team all hands, in our communications so you hear the word innovation, an awful lot. Patents are just one natural outcome of the innovation we do. We don’t do patents for patents sake we do them because they’re an additive to the work we’re already doing. We use our patents to highlight our capabilities in order to attract and retain new customers and to highlight the great work that we’re doing to prospective new crew members. We do, as patents are designed, use them as a defensive bulk work when absolutely necessary.

Natalie Reina: Awesome and in a recent interview that we did with you. You talked a lot about follow through when we’re talking about innovations at SailPoint. So can you explain to me and walk us through how you go from an idea to an actual patent? That seems like a lot of steps in the middle. So can you just tell us, like how that comes to fruition?

Matt Domsch: There are quite a few steps. The first starts with a good idea and the crew member will often will write to me directly, or to our patent committee to present their, their new idea. Oftentimes, that will require a little bit of refinement to be very clear as to what it is that they believe that they have invented. What’s new, what’s unique in in their idea. And so I’ll work with them real closely to clearly articulate that. We then take that to our patents committee, which consists of the senior engineers and architects across the company, members of the crew that have gotten several patents themselves. And the new inventor has a chance to present their idea there and they get asked some really good questions. We focus on what is new and unique about this idea, what is, how is it different than what has been done in the past and really what the business value is in bringing this forward because it’s fairly expensive to file for a patent and we’re not going to just file on any idea that comes up.

Once the patent committee has had a chance to look at it. We then take it to our patent attorneys and they sit down and we’ll do interviews with the crew members. They’ll write up the formal legalese that is a patent application. And that takes several rounds of revisions and edits in order to be sure that it’s accurate and complete and then the patent gets sent off to the patent office. At this point we have to wait a while, in some cases it’s six months, we’ve been real lucky with some of our patents recently. In some cases it’s six years. In the meantime, we continue to develop our products and bring that idea to fruition while we’re waiting on the patent office. Now, we certainly aren’t going to wait around for them. At some point that patent does eventually grant and at that point, we have a chance to celebrate because all the hard work has finally paid off and the individuals get the, the full recognition for what they’ve accomplished.

Natalie Reina: Great. And when I sat down with you last year to discuss our patent program, you said innovations can strike at any point during the process by really any person. So can you give me an example of that?

Matt Domsch: Sure, absolutely. And I’ve got two examples at either end of the product development spectrum. The first is what you could consider the traditional approach and this is what our data science team has done and has been very successful with the recent patents that are part of our Predictive Identity platform, the recommendation engine, our role mining capability or peer group analysis. Here our data science team really started from the theoretical end of the spectrum where they understood a capability our customers were asking for, but no one really understood the best approach to get there. And so the they did a lot of brainstorming. They spent a lot of time just thinking about and looking for tools that we can employ in new and different ways. For example, a new graph database technology that’s come into play in just the last few years that has been instrumental to a lot of the work we’ve done. They’ll bring these new tools and approaches to try solving the problems and find that we can now do things such as role mining in a more intuitive and efficient manner than what we’ve been able to do before. They’re very good about bringing their ideas to the patent committee early on, even before there’s a lot of code written to, to implement it, because that’s not required for a patent and you get the idea out there and you work on the development of that in parallel. And it’s been a lot of fun watching that process turn those ideas into product and get it out into customers hands.

The second end of the spectrum there is the innovations that have been coming out of our services team for the last couple of years here. The team is working very closely with our customers and they have our existing products in their hands and they’re seeing what’s working for the customer, what’s not working as well. They see where improvements can be made in the user experience, in the the setup, in the simplicity and they will come back with their own targeted fixes for a specific customer and then present those as improvements that can get incorporated into the broader platform. At that point what they’ve done to one customer becomes available for all of our customers. The IdentityIQ Accelerator Pack is a key example of this services driven innovation in action as that’s now being incorporated into our IdentityIQ platform directly.

Natalie Reina: Great and speaking of customers. What has been the customer reaction so far to our recently approved patents?

Matt Domsch: Yeah it’s actually been pretty exciting. We had a chance to present many of the ideas that have been incorporated in the recommendation engine, our role mining, our peer group detection, our File Access Manager crowdsourcing capabilities at our Navigate conference last summer. And we had standing room only crowds for those presentations. The interest that’s come out of that from some of our, you know, leading-edge customers wanting to see how these new capabilities can reduce their workload and simplify their governance practices has just been very, very encouraging. The more customers are hearing about it, the more they want to get in on it.

Natalie Reina: Standing room only, that’s what we like to hear right Matt?

Matt Domsch: Absolutely.

Natalie Reina: And I just wanted to quickly touch on that. Matt was recently interviewed by Built in Austin on the same topic, so keep your eyes peeled for that media head that’s going to be coming out shortly. So Matt, thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate you explaining the patent program to us. There’s been amazing patents coming out of SailPoint in the past couple of years, so thank you.

Matt Domsch: Thank you, Natalie. It’s always fun.

Natalie Reina: This is Identity Talks. Thank you for watching.

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