The reason I’ve decided to join Saviynt was because my wife agreed it was a good idea. I’ve prepared an essay, entirely in my head, and I presented her the 3 things that made me think this was a good idea, during the Easter holiday of 2024. Today is the first time I had the chance to put these 3 reasons on paper:
The IGA problem
I’ve always followed a principle in my career that was better explained by Uri Levine, the co-founder of Waze (now Google): “you need to fall in love with the problem, not the solution”. The problem of managing identities has followed me for the past 25 years. And it still is an unsolved problem. According to my former employer, Gartner, almost half of projects that tried to solve this problem are in distress.
“You need to fall in love with the problem, not the solution”
As a matter of fact, when I was the chair of Gartner’s IAM summit, identity governance and administration (IGA) was the #1 problem our attendees wanted to talk about, year after year. More than access management (AM), SSO, PAM, or anything else in identity.
I always knew identity was one of the biggest problems in IT. And IGA is the technology that allows organizations to onboard, move and offboard users in an efficient and secure way. Without IGA, organizations don't have the necessary plumbing for processes to flow, it's the same as running a country without potable water (see Figure 1).
Figure 1. A Company Without IGA Plumbing
The technology
So after 5 plus years at Gartner, I realized that if I REALLY wanted to help solve this problem that doesn’t go away, I needed to take matters into my own hands. It was not an easy decision, but once I had that realization, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I needed to improve the tools that exist today, I needed to find the right platform, nimble and agile, but complete enough to get there. So, as all analysts do, I looked for evidence.
Customer recognition
Saviynt has been recognized with the highest overall customer rating of 4.7 out of 5 stars as of June 3, 2024 and has been named a Peer Insights Customers’ Choice three years in a row.
IGA with PAM
The strong capabilities are there, and more important, Saviynt has built it all converged in the cloud: IGA with PAM. I have been telling my good share of bad analogies and dad jokes for a while. To this day, I still use the one about the pizza, half PAMperoni, half MargerIGA. PAM should never have been an isolated, separated market. PAM, in my mind was always an integral part of IGA. Why buy a separate tool for that? A PAM vault should be part of IGA, because you need to create a safe way to store everyone's credentials. And the identity lifecycle should cover all kinds of identities, privileged or not. Humans and machines. Internal and external identities. Saviynt had all those “good bones” for IGA and PAM, in a single product (see Figure 3).
Figure 3 - An IAM pizza, Half PAMperoni, half MagherIGA
The people
I’ve known Saviynt’s CEO, Sachin Nayyar for more than 15 years. I met him when he founded Vaau, and I was one of the first people who implemented its role management tool in Brazil. I remember when Vaau was sold to Sun in 2007, and eventually became Oracle’s identity analytics product. Sachin had this vision of the importance of analytics in cybersecurity which I always agreed with very much. Then I would observe his future successes launching Securonix. When Sachin came back to Saviynt, that was a turning point for the company, bringing in even more investment, on top of new hires like Jeff Margolies from Mandiant/Google. I knew for sure this would be a fun and smart team to be in!
This has been my first week working as the new senior vice president of strategy at Saviynt. As I get to know more of their amazing people, the more I am sure this was the right move at the right time.
Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice constitute the subjective opinions of individual end-user reviews, ratings, and data applied against a documented methodology; they neither represent the views of, nor constitute an endorsement by, Gartner or its affiliates.