Mike Thompson - ICSynergy International (Radio Cut).mp4

Mike Thompson, managing partner for ICSynergy International-- I run the business. I run all of our partnerships. I'm Mike Thompson, managing partner for ICSynergy International. I run the partnerships. I run the business. And most importantly, I own all of our most important customers and make sure they're successful. ICSynergy International has been around for almost 15 years now. So we'd like to think of ourselves as the folks who we're building identity and access management solutions before there were identity and access management solutions, like the One Identity solution. We're pretty lasered on identity and access management. There tends to be a little bit of drift around the security peripherals, but identity and access management is what we do best. It's more important to secure identities. You just have to open the newspaper, or you have to be at a conference-- pick a conference-- the last three conferences I've been at over the last month-- and everybody's talking about Equifax. They're talking about breach. And really, I think that's become the essence of the identity and access management world. So it's a component part. It's not everything. But we tend to think that identities compromised are a really bad thing and potentially something that's going to show up in the papers for our customers. Our customers are facing security risks, I believe, that they really haven't faced to the level that they faced before. So a lot of this is nation states attacking. The hackers of old, I think, are not what we worry about anymore. So having a very robust identity and access management solution, which if I was to zero in on what we're seeing is most important to our customers right now, it isn't the attestation, certifications and audits that we all thought about from the travesties of old. But it really focuses around privileged access. And privileged access is, I think, the typical, I'm going to break into someone's system. And then I'm going to escalate my privileges. And then I'm going to steal everything that's important to that company. And I'm going to give it to somebody, or I'm going to sell it. We're seeing a trend in the identity governance space. Remember, all we really focus on is identity and access management. And this is starting to become the hybrid word in identity and access management-- has become the mantra of all the analysts, right? So what we're trying to focus on are companies, One Identity being one of our best partnerships, who are still focusing on the on-premise solution in a big way, and continuing to release innovative features, and thinking about the customer-- not pushing this into OK, well, this is passe. We're moving on. So that's really important in this relationship. So we choose One Identity as one of our-- I'll call it a pillar-- in our partnership programs. So we like to think ourselves as a very tight consulting organization first and foremost. So we do a lot of strategy work. We choose One Identity as one of our most important partnerships for a couple of reasons. One of the reasons is I like to think One Identity is a similar size to ICSynergy International-- so not quite-- a little difference in the size of the organization. And we focus mostly in North America. But the relationships that we built with every single component part, whether it's the product organization, the services organization, probably most importantly for me, is sales organization, is different from any other relationship we have. And that changes the dynamics of the relationship in front of a customer. So there's this comfort level when we're talking with a customer or when we're putting together a proposal for a customer as a team-- ICSynergy and One Identity. It's very transparent and comfortable. It isn't prescribed. We know what each other are thinking almost, So when we look at the portfolio of solutions that ICSynergy brings from a consulting side of the house, and then One Identity, we tend to zero in on a couple of things. So there's the traditional audit, certifications, attestations that every public company needs to follow so that the people that are testing don't go to jail, right? So that's been around since the days of Enron and et cetera. But what we're seeing right now is this transformation. And then I'm going to talk a little bit here about what we're seeing is the One Identity cloud transformation, OK? So it's not, perhaps, what we see from some of the single sign on players or whatever. So we're looking at how do large customers, medium-sized customers, operate their business? And what we're seeing is this dramatic shift. So it's cloud, but what we're seeing is our customers living in ServiceNow. So the fact that we've been able to put together solutions together-- One Identity and ICSynergy-- and I'm bringing the product team to bear here, the services team to bear-- that are really comprehensive, but more importantly, easy to use. If you're living in a solution like ServiceNow, where it's doing everything, you have to make sure you can provision your solutions, your applications, your end users. Give them what they need when they want it. And then, of course, take it away. So that adds a level of complexity that we feel we've just got a unique solution with the folks from One Identity. Business benefits can happen in a couple of ways, right? So one is a return on ROI. I bought a solution, and I made everything happen in a really seamless manner. We didn't have to have any human intervention anymore. And so that's the one dimension. Then the other dimension that's important to our customers, again, and I'll go back to two things like ServiceNow, that's a return on investment. When you can move to an industry-leading solution that everybody is adopting-- you know, if these things go in waves-- and be able to still end up with your certifications, attestations, audit functions, and yet be living in a cloud solution, to me, that starts to become the essence of a hybrid solution. So cloud-- and not to frame this up as an analyst would-- is on every single customer's mind. And typically, it's more in the mind of a CISO, so the chief information security officer, or the CIO. Everybody goes to conferences. Everybody wants to be part of the movement. Everybody wants to simplify their business. People don't want to have to do all of the things that they used to have to do-- install servers, take care of servers, have expensive people like us managing their identity and access management solutions. But the thing that I'm seeing is maybe, in my mind, the most important thing-- it's one of the things that One Identity is doing-- and I think I like their measured approach to this-- is their Starling initiative. So analytics-- and again, just in the last three months, the conferences I've been to, or people I've talked to-- analytics is becoming the key to running their business. And then we can zoom back to what we talked about to begin with, and breach, and having the ability to look at things before they happen, within reason, is hugely important to our clients. So I like the approach that One Identity is taking. It isn't everything's in the cloud, and, oh, by the way, now we've forgotten about the solution that we sold you One year ago, three years ago, five years ago. That continues to evolve. I like the measured approach. So identity as a service means so many different things to every single one of our customers. There's no one component part. Some people think single sign on. This has been a phenomenon for the last three or four years. I like to think of identity as a service as almost a selection, a composite of micro services, that a customer ultimately will be able to put together the pieces that best represent how they're going to solve their business problems. Words about trust. So when I think about trust, I think first and foremost, maybe not about One Identity-- but I'll talk about that in a second. What I think about is the trust between us and our clients. The reason we've been in business for 15 years is really simple. We don't fail. They have an inordinate amount of trust. So when people put their faith in us, they put their trust in us. We're going to make sure that we don't disappoint them. We've had customers for eight or nine years. Some of the customers are new customers that we see the same sorts of relationships building. A lot of times people will say, wow, you run the company. You spend a lot of time with us. Because if you don't spend the time with them, then how do you differentiate yourself? And that's where you build the trust. You build a relationship. And in my mind, relationships are everything. I'm not actually shocked, but I mean, it falls into the very traditional identity and access management. I almost feel like if you talk to anybody, and you show them this video, they would go, that's interesting, but that's-- we've known that for 10 or 15 years. So it really comes down to what the solution set is for that. And I think the solution set for that is the governance solution. But I think it's also got to be wrapped by some of the analytics, where you start to pull the multi-components to get the UEBA and things like that. But it's-- yeah. I'd be worried it wouldn't come out right. --10%-- Right. --roughly around there. So, I mean, it truly comes down to how successful your identity program is, right? So, right? That's the way I would probably answer that question. If you haven't done a good job, and you haven't put the right things in place, you haven't put the right solution in place, then it's going to fail. And it could be 3%. [LAUGHS] So, I don't know. So what keeps me up at night is really simple. I talked earlier about how important trust is with our clients. I don't ever want to be in a situation where one of my customers, that become friends, calls me and says, because you did this the wrong way, or you missed something, we've got a major problem. That's what keeps me up. I don't-- I'm not worried about the breaches in the sense of the corporations. I think we got our part down pat. I think when we use the One Identity solution, we know this. We've been doing this with Quest since-- seven years, I think, we've had this relationship. So we understand that solution inside out. Being partner of the year means a lot. So from our-- as a corporation, as a company being partner of the year, is incredible. But what's even better is to see the person that leads our One Identity practice become the practitioner of the year-- get an award and stand up in front of all of the partner community and his peers, and have such a big smile on his face. That's cool.