This is identity at the center. If it has anything to do with
IAM, this is the go to podcast now your hosts Jim McDonald and
Jeff Stedman. Welcome to the Identity at the
Center podcast. I'm Jeff and that's Jim.
Hey, Jim. Hey, Jeff, how are you?
Oh, not so bad yourself. Good.
It's been an interesting week so far.
And then we're early in the week.
You and I have been working on the business of a nonprofit.
And I remember we were talking about, OK, how do we set this up
and said nonprofit. Yeah, that sounds easy.
Let's do that. But I mean, if you think about
it, I mean five, almost five years ago, so our unofficial 5
year anniversary is July 2nd, right?
That was when we launched our first episode of the podcast
that was truly pirate radio and we operated for a couple years
just producing podcasts. And then we said, look, we want
to do some more things, bring some more content to our
listeners, and we want to go to conferences like EIC.
And none of that stuff is cheap. I mean, just running a podcast
of high quality is not cheap. And so here we are, right?
We have the nonprofit organization to set up to cover
a lot of that. And it's it's a lot of work.
It is. It has consumed my life I think
since December. I usually take the last couple
weeks off of December to kind of like recharge and going to get
ready. And I spent that entire time
getting trying to get things off the ground.
I really wish there was a like, here's some, here's, here's a
plea, right, for somebody out there like make an easy button
for this. Like, hey, I want to start this
and if you have a service that like helps do nonprofit in a
box, reach out to me because I I would definitely consume that
service. But it is a lot of work.
Well, the other the other big effort now is we're putting more
attention on our YouTube. And so I've been going out and
watching like, how do you grow your YouTube channel?
How do you make better videos? What's the key in here?
OK, it's thumbnails and it's this, but really it's the things
that we've been doing, focusing on the niche, which ours is
digital identity and being consistent.
So we publish an episode every Monday and then a lot of weeks.
It's more than that. So I think we're doing the right
things now. It's, it's tweaking.
But there are also like, OK, well here's you know, you can go
from what we have now like 250 subscribers to thousands.
You can have 100,000 subscribers if you got the credit card
you're willing to swipe. And I I propose a resolution
that we never do that because I don't think that's what we're
all about. I just want to have a a
organically grown YouTube channel just like we did with
the podcast. But I also would say that I'm
not against like asking folks who listen like go out and
subscribe to our YouTube. This is a shameless plug.
Subscribe right is. That I don't mind.
I don't mind doing the shameless plug.
I just don't want to swipe the credit card.
That that does not surprise me based on expense reports that
I've been looking at. Yeah, I don't.
I don't really enjoy spending money aimlessly.
No, I don't think anybody does. But yes, doing more on the
YouTube channel, go like subscribe to all that fun stuff
took us a while to build up the audio here.
We are now trying to build the video.
So we'll see how it goes. But you know we are, we are a
niche podcast. I think we're just helpful.
It's Identity access management, but we are worldwide, we have
listeners 10s of thousands around the world at this point.
And I forget the last count, but I think we were heard in just
about every country in the world, including North Korea,
which I find really interesting. Yeah, we've got one listener
there, I think, Kim. Jong is a IS.
Listening, the Supreme Ruler has somebody in in some office like
making sure that we don't talk negatively about his country and
and we won't if if you help us grow the subscriber piece there.
If you subscribe, we we turn a blind eye to issues like that.
Is that what you're saying, Jim? I hope.
Not, yeah, no. It has some integrity.
Well, you always finish the shows by saying share it with a
friend, share it with an enemy, we don't care as long as you
share it. But also in this, in this day
and age of where we're doing more video, if you look behind
me, if you're listening to audio, you probably, you
obviously can't see it. But I only have one diploma on
the wall. Now I'm going to put the other
one under it and then I'm going to take our Identiverse banner
from last year and put it there. And I mean the biggest thing was
this identiverse banner. It was really cool, you know,
having a room and Identiverse last year.
We're going to have spaces this year to do it again.
But that placard, you know, I valued us so much.
I carried it home all the way from Vegas, back through Atlanta
into Augusta, GA. On foot?
In the snow? Uphill both ways?
No, but. I was on that tram in Atlanta,
which you know, like how many people get on that tram and
don't hold onto a pole or onto something.
And then it comes to the hard stop and they fall all over.
Happens every single time. And like, I'm guarding this
thing with my life to make sure that people fall into the the
Styrofoam placard. Well, it's like, you know, we'll
we'll keep collecting those like Thanos collecting Infinity Gems.
Since we're going to be at Identiverse later this year, I
think we'll have some signings there too.
So hopefully you'll be able to get another one home.
Let's just start building like you know your background, just
be all conference identiverse or you know conference identity at
the center type type stuff behind.
You. My entire home.
On the outside, yeah, speaking
Identiverse, we are going to be there. 2024 is coming up and
we've got a discount code for folks so time is running short I
think. I'm not sure if early bird
discount. It's really not early bird at
this point since we're less than a month away.
But if you're a a late attendee you can use the code IDV 2 four
Dash IDAC 25 and then I'll get you 25% off of your
registration. We'll have a link in our show
notes because I know that's really easy to remember.
But if you just check the show notes for us, or if you're
watching on YouTube, I'll have it in the, you know, the thing
below. You'll be able to to grab it
from there. But that is coming up May 28th
to the 31st. Jim, you and I will be in Vegas.
We'll be podcasting and I'll be moderating a panel with our
friends Sean and Atul and others, and just generally
gallivanting around town. As the Upright Gentleman Podcast
too, we're going to be recording podcasts and there's going to be
live listen options. We have two locations we're
going to be podcasting from. So I guess we haven't really
talked about how we're going to, where we're going to publish
those schedules. But I'm thinking on our website,
idacpodcast.com, we can schedule, you know, put out the
schedule so people can either sit in the room with us or
there's another one, which I've been calling the fishbowl
because it's a room with like, glass walls and they're putting
headphones outside of that fishbowl that people can listen
to the conversation that's happening inside.
You know what? I just.
Created more work for me to update the website with a new
schedule and a new apparently a new page and keeping it updated
in case things change throughout the week, which they will.
So thank you for that. How about you do it on LinkedIn
or Twitter or something like that instead?
I'm well, I'll definitely do that.
Definitely. I'll commit to doing that.
But here's the thought I was having is we're going to be in
this fishbowl with the headphones.
Is there going to be some Sandy wipes?
Sanitary wipes to? Because I don't want to put
headphones on that may have been used by several people before
me. Sorry, I just.
I don't want to. That's why I bring my own
monitors, so I'll just use those.
OK, well everyone else will have to use use those, so.
Yeah, the filthy unwashed peasants around us watching.
Yeah, that's not the only conference we have coming up,
right. We've got the a discount code
for folks who are going to be going right to the European
identity and Cloud conference EIC in Berlin which is the week
after I dinner versus June 4th through 7th in Berlin.
Discount code is EIC 24, IDAC 25 gets you 25% off.
The link will be in the in the show notes.
Or you can go to Cooper Coal dot com and navigate your way there,
but the discount code will work the same either way.
And then Identity Week. We'll be at the Identity Week
America in Washington DC September 11th and 12th.
There's also one in Europe June 11th through 12th in Amsterdam
and Asia. Identity Week Asia is in
Singapore October 22nd and 23rd. Discount code IDAC 30 which will
give you 30% off. It's a nice round Number.
You're getting better at reading these off this is.
I'm getting better. It's getting better.
The first time I tried it was like reading it word for word
and I was like never doing that again.
I'm trying to read off like a a super long URL.
That's a real bad idea. My favorite is when you gave the
wrong code for the wrong conference and I was just
sitting here like Nope, Nope, that's not right.
Hey, you always said we can call time out and we can.
Yeah, we can always do it now. We'll do it live.
We'll figure it out. What else do we want to talk
about before we introduce our guest?
Well, I think we should introduce our guest because
we've been going for quite a while now.
Yeah, let's get to it. Patrick Harding, he's a Chief
product architect at Ping Identity.
Welcome to Identity at the center, Patrick.
Thank you guys. Appreciate it.
Yeah. Thanks for taking the time.
Let's start with a little bit about your background.
How did you get into the IAM industry?
Is it something that you chose or did it choose you?
A little bit of both. I used to be way back in the
day, a enterprise security architect at Fidelity
Investments in Boston, and I was doing security pen testing,
firewalls, things like that, you know, back actually before it
was called cyber. So we're going to talk today a
little bit about artificial intelligence.
I know it's kind of a fad. It's probably not going to stick
around for a while, but I'd like to talk about it a little more
detail. One of the things that I find
interesting is the definition of AI because I feel like my
definition has changed, you know, within the last couple
years with you know large language models and and things
like that where it was. It's not just kind of behind the
scenes right now we're using to generate, generate things
generative AI. We want to talk about, hey, how
AI is impacting identity space. But before we get there, how do
you define AI today? Sure.
So I think you know we've been sort of doing and talking about
gene learning and I suppose many people might have called that or
would have called that AI. But I think the term AI now is
more associated with generative AI or Gen.
AI. We're thinking about the use of
generative AI, you know, basically.
Jim, how does your definition of AI stand today?
It's evolving. You know I thought you said to
Patrick was a degenerate AI and I was like, oh, that's something
I could get behind. That actually reminded me of the
presentation that Andre Durant did last year at identiversity
kind of showed the the bad side of AI.
Well, how it could be used as a weapon and I thought that's a
good term degenerate AI. But you know, I here's my, my
hold up with AI really is that I feel like it has the potential
to be a misused term where it's like, you know, tied laundry
soap. Now with AI you throw it around
too much then what does it really mean?
But I think you know Patrick let us down the right path error,
you know thinking of it around this generative AI more than
just hey, we we can do business intelligence with large data
sets because I think that's not really what AI was all about is
around using natural language and a system being able to
interpret that into something it can work with, right.
And then I love the iterative capability with the language
models, large language models as they call it, where you can keep
ask refining questions and either zooming in or or leaning
back to get the right answer what you're really looking for.
But I also do think what one of the things for me that that that
still surprised me about AI is that you could ask you something
like a math question and it can get it absolutely wrong and you
know it's wrong, right, because it's like not even close to what
you were expecting. And then you ask it, Are you
sure about that? Oh, sorry, I made a mistake.
And then we're going to fix the problem.
And what other computer technology do you know that does
stuff like that? It's almost like degenerate AI.
So there's another use for that term.
I mean one of the other ways to think about it is that you know
with Gen. AI, we're now talking about
stuff that can pass the Turing test.
And prior to prior to that I said I I think when we talked
about machine learning, that wasn't the case.
And you know now when you're interacting something and it's
human like, it's actually quite exciting to be honest.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's really cool.
This is finally like a technology you could see putting
inside a robot and now it's like more humanizing of the whole
experience. But one of the things you said
yesterday, Patrick, as we were talking through and preparing
for this call, was AI is going to be everywhere.
And I was wondering if you could explain to us what you meant by
that. Sure.
So I I just think that AI is going to emerge in you know all
products and services that we end up you know leveraging.
I think it's going to actually be fairly quickly adopted
whether you know, whether it's into, you know things we, you
know things, we drive the services, we're interacting with
the, you know, everything. Yeah.
And part of everything is how it's affecting the digital
identity industry. I was wondering if you could
expand a little bit on how you see AI fitting into the
industry, the good and the bad. So the conversations we've had
and turned that into the keynote, funnily enough, really
from from an identity standpoint, the way we've been
thinking about it, it sort of breaks down into two areas.
One is to improve our products and identity capabilities in
general, both for administrators and end users.
Also, it's how AI can be used for bad like dark AI, dark side
of AI. And that's really, you know the
realm of how AI can be used. Everybody knows and understands
deep fakes, things like that. But also how AI can be used to
perform other fraud. You know, whether it's
automating the generation of phishing emails, using
information that the AI can go and collect off the dark web, or
or just off the web in general in ways you can't imagine.
No longer are you going to see emails from Nigerian fraudsters.
Basically that misspells words and stuff like that.
So again I see it both the good but going to be used for fraud
too. Yeah, I mean, you're seeing that
already, right? The phishing emails are becoming
less obvious. Let's say that it's I I always
like, shake my head. Like the attacks are still
social engineering and phishing. They're still one and two, and I
kind of feel like, you know, on the social engineering side, the
use of video and voice over, you know, that seems to be probably
the most dangerous combination when it comes to AI for bad.
An employee in Hong Kong was joined on Zoom by a deep fake
video of their CFO and was basically talked into moving $25
million do a you know, fraudulent account basically.
So it's extremely real and a survey I think that were
released today or imminently where you know over 50% of the
respondents are very concerned about deep fakes right now.
And so it's it's a very top of mind issue across the across the
lobe right now. So we definitely have to get on
top of this. Yeah, absolutely.
And Jeff, I mean are there, do you have any thoughts in this
area about where you're seeing AI for either good or evil?
Well, the, you know, the the best example was our show opener
for April 1st where I took AI voices and turned that into sort
of how we open up the show. But sure, it's like anything
else, right? AI is a tool.
It will be used for good. It will be used for bad.
Patrick, you mentioned the Hong Kong scenario.
I mean 25 million or whatever. It was out the door because of a
very heavily invested attack. That's not cheap to do to get
like a bunch of people deep faked on a team's call and then,
you know, have to target essentially one person.
That seems to me like that was pretty targeted.
I know what they wanted to do there.
That took a lot of investment. But I mean A is everywhere now
at this point. It's helping us write emails, It
is helping us configure our security tools.
It is, you know, cleaning up voices and now people are
starting to use it to generate videos.
So I'm still a glass half full person when it comes to it, but
I think we do need to be careful about how it's used and to be
able to identify the provenance of how some of these things are
coming along. You know, is this really Jeff
talking on the screen, you know, and what you're hearing or is it
AI, How, how do you confirm that?
Is there a way to kind of, you know, make make that
authenticity known? So I you're landing in that in
that area, I I completely agree Jeff.
It's just going to be a constant cat and mouse game like it has
been in security for, you know, 20 years.
What we're going to actually, I think, have to actually change
the way that we think about using certain channels of
communication. Traditionally we've had this
implicit trust where the voice I'm listening to, I recognize
therefore it must be Jeff or it must be Andre.
The face or the the face I see on the screen looks like Andre.
So it's Andre. Basically.
We're going to have to start to get used to I think looking to
establish explicit trust but but doing it out of band.
So actually you know if I'm on a a voice call with Andre sending
me something out of band to say hey it's me Andre, I'm like that
we're seeing it a little bit in in in sort of that to me is like
peer-to-peer interactions. We're seeing it a little bit
more in sort of business to consumer interactions to a
certain extent where you know even though I'm talking to the
bank, the bank still needs to confirm it's me.
So they might ask me for a voice authentication for some sort of
other transaction. They might basically ask me for
a PIN. Yeah I think there's there's a
lot of good points and you think about the approach you just
talked about there reminds me of multi factor authentication.
You know it's multi factor and and realistically just like with
social engineering, just like with phishing, none of the
safeguards we put in place are going to be catch alls unless
people are skeptical enough to ask themselves a question.
Really. Should I click on the link and
type in my credentials and give this information?
Should I do secondary checks? Should I be skeptical and just
think a little bit of skepticism before sending 25 million even
though at all the people on the phone?
How about a text message to one of the people you know?
How about a a follow up phone call?
I don't think it, it doesn't necessarily need to be all the
time, but it's recognizing on certain certain interactions
transactions, requests that maybe that's worthy of an
outbound thing and exchange essentially to to confirm and
it's that confirmation step that I think it's important but it's
difficult. I mean it's it's going to we're
going to have to retrain people to not.
No, we don't. We tried to train people not to
trust every e-mail they see. We're going to have to, you know
train people not to trust every phone call, every video call,
stuff like that they see too. So that's again, it's going to
be challenging, which is why we need to set up sort of
established processes where people get used to the notion
of, you know, confirming out of band that they're interacting
with certain people and stuff like that.
It it's going to have to become second nature to them, otherwise
they'll forget. Let's talk about AI governance
because they, you know, I feel like the first time this topic
came up was really around things like ChatGPT becoming available
on the Internet and folks like us kind of discovering them and
being able to start to query information.
Then you start to think about, well, everything we're feeding
into this becomes part of the model, right?
And if we start putting proprietary information either
on purpose or by accident proprietary information, it
becomes part of the model. And so you know that's where I
first kind of became aware of where companies need to put
together some kind of governance, some kind of policy.
But I also see now AI is much bigger than just ChatGPT.
It's we're implementing products that have AI kind of baked into
them. We are maybe building products
that have AI built into them, maybe our end products that we
sell to consumers have AI. So given all that, where do you
see the AI governance, what's important and who are kind of
the the folks that need to be involved when you think about a
corporation? We ended up realizing that we
already have data governance like policies in place.
So we added some AI governance and then got everybody to sort
of re sign the data governance policies.
That's grown a little bit because it's it's expanded
beyond chat. GPT now where we've asked people
to basically let us know, are you looking what other services
are you looking at using to understand what their terms and
conditions look like the how they leverage you know the data
that we provide and share with them.
So again we, you know again we're being very cautious and
careful there. We definitely want to use Gen.
AI with confidential data, not PII but confidential data.
And in that case we're you know we're looking at just using
services like Open AI sort of enterprise capability where they
isolate the use of that data just to a model that's under
under sort of our control. So there's no leakage of that
information into other areas. So we're being very, very
cautious there. Obviously we can take it a step
further and say look we're not comfortable with any of that.
We're just going to run the open source models ourselves and
that's something else we'll we're we're evaluating too.
Is that realistic? I mean, in your mind, because I
I kind of expected the answer you just gave there, which is
that say you're building an identity management solution,
leveraging one of the big AI tech platforms for your AI
engine and then kind of carving out some kind of tenant if you
will, for lack of a better term. But is it realistic to think
that a company that specializes in one area of technology that's
not AI could build enough robust AI?
Or you're only looking at that because that's potentially the
only solution. When you're talking about the
use of say open A, let's say the GPT 4 APIs for example, they're
they're not, I mean they're they're slow.
They respond very, very slowly today, obviously likely that
will improve over time, but they they don't respond very quickly.
That's OK if we're talking about you know, sort of natural
language processing queries and stuff like that where people are
comfortable you know waiting for that response to come back.
But for other real time use where we're talking about
needing to get responses back in, you know milliseconds,
that's where we might need to evaluate the use of models that
might have been trained by the bigger models like the the, the
larger LLMS. But but you know where we're
running them locally ourselves and again these things don't
actually have to be very big but they can respond faster and they
become the. The way I think about it is, you
know I say ChatGPT, it is a is a an encyclopedia of knowledge.
It has vast knowledge of across lots and lots of things.
But you can start to think about trading models with far more
localized knowledge that might be very, very specific but very
good to certain tasks and you ask them to become experts in
something much narrower. Therefore they can respond much
quicker. And that and and being an expert
in something very narrower, maybe we can use an open source
model to do that and and run it locally ourselves.
Yeah, it yeah. So open source model makes
sense. I guess what I'm it's
interesting going back to when Jeff asked me what's my
definition of AI? And I don't think it gave great
answers. Like I know it when I see it and
I know when it's fake AI. Like fake AI to me is like, hey,
did you know that 80% of the people who are like Jeff Sedman
also have this, this role? And why don't you just give that
role to Jeff Stedman that's not AI.
Because then if I say, well, what if I give Jeff Stedman the
role, then what's going to happen is sorry, that input is
invalid. Like you've totally lost
credibility with me. And that's to me like the state
of of AI in identity products that I see.
There are other ways to think about how AI might be used in in
identity. And for example if you have a
set of prisation policies that are applicable to a certain
regulation and that regulation gets updated, you could ask the
AI to, you know, reread that regulation and make the
suggestions on how the authorization policies get to
change. Basic dated regulatory framework
it sees and therefore you start to basically just provide you
know it. It eliminates a lot of the human
work and allows you to basically, you know, get to,
yeah, get to get get to meet the requirements and to compliance
more quickly in those situations.
So I I think it's very good at looking at these data sets,
whether it's you know, regulatory frameworks, security
policies, things like that, analyzing it and making
recommendations much like a business analyst might do who
has been asked to actually learn and understand these things as
well. I think this whole topic of the
idea of like so for me and here would be a great example of what
an AI could do. If I could say, hey, tell me all
the people who can place orders on this system and it's like OK,
I don't know. And then you start asking you a
follow up questions or maybe giving you a follow up
information to define what roles can place orders on this
systems. Now I can tell you, OK, yeah,
these people have these roles and then you could say, all
right, well, you know what else is included in those roles?
Like you can start actually getting meaningful information
by having a conversation like with AAI interface.
Now here's where I was going with the walls need to be
defined. What if I were to say I'm used
ping for an example since that that's your company?
What if I were to say OK how many of my users have multi
factor authentication? Says 80%, how does that compare
to other ping customers? Now if it said 75% have 80% or
more of their users with that, I don't think that violates any
kind of non confidentiality that you would have with your other
customers, at least for my money.
But if I were to say, hey, I know that corporation XYZ is on
Ping and I said how many corporation XYZ users use multi
factor authentication Were giving you the answer that would
not be good. So there's not only just my
opinion or not only like Ping's tenant, but it would be each
customer has. You'd have to have some data
segmentation within those customers and the AI would have
to be smart enough to basically apply rules to make sure that if
you were going to have any kind of like cross customer
information that it would be generic enough not to be
revealing anything that's proprietary to those customers.
That's that's what I wanted to throw out there.
I actually agree with you. I think that's a great example.
Asking for that in terms context of like, you know, locally it's,
you know, my organization. But how does that compare to
other organizations? Is completely reasonable use of
the tech, the notion of having an assistant for access
certifications or access reviews or an access review on someone
to be able to query. All right, when you know, when
was this person granted that access in, in what's in who
granted it, what was the, you know, what was the
rationalization for it? How much have, how much have
they used it in this period of time?
Being able to sort of query and ask for, ask me for that
information to very quickly be able to reach a decision I think
would have huge utility. Actually, we're talking about
being able just to ask natural language queries that can be
parsed and actually turned into, you know, real, real questions
you ask of the system. It becomes very much more of a
interface that people can be comfortable with.
Just, you know, asking for asking for information is going
to help them make decisions in certain ways.
What do you see as a is destiny when it comes to the identity
and access management space? And then what do you think is
going to hold it back from achieving that destiny?
One of the things that we've been thinking about here a
little bit is recognizing that AI Gen.
AI is a little different to some of the other core capabilities
we've been relying on to deliver identity services.
Things like you know compute and storage and CPUI think it's
going to look very different in 18 months and very different
again in three years. So it it it's really like a
little we're sort of like moving in a little bit to the unknown
because we haven't necessarily thought about the art of the
possible here based on where Gen.
AI might be in 18 months. So, you know, realistically,
could we be talking about authentication and authorization
services that really can just be queried and they recognize who
you are and are able to essentially return a
authorization decision based on who you are in the context of
what you're going to try and do without necessarily having to
write any rules? All right.
Can the Gen. AI be as smart as what a
security admin might be if you was to be given that query or
the person writing the security policies or the business
analytics for the business application.
Could the AI be smart enough to be able to respond here in real
time? And the other thing is we talk
about the identity infrastructure sort of being
Gen. AI based.
What does it look like for a bank Ledger to now be basically
you know based on a Gen. AI that's the bank Ledger or
ACRM application interacting with an identity infrastructure.
So it it completely reshapes the way we think about I think how
applications are actually going to interact with each other.
The AI is become, they evolve, they become even smarter and
they become faster at responding stuff like that.
I I'm very concerned about them becoming self learning, like
recursive self learning where they become smarter on their own
sort of thing because that's you know what was it war games circa
1985 that like that movie or something like that.
How, how does this evolve and how do we put some checks and
balances in place basically as well.
So again I I think this is going to happen over the next few
years. What you know I I think the
second-half of this, what's going to hold it back, I I think
it is going to be people's natural aversion to significant
change. And you know, it's a little like
the late 2000s, early twenty 10s where a lot of, you know,
generally a lot of smaller businesses that were less risk
averse were willing to adopt the cloud because they saw the cost
benefit of doing that. And over time as the cloud
infrastructure basically, you know, they put more security
around it, you know, more regularly, you know, regulation
around it and they got comfortable with it.
You started to see larger enterprises taking advantage of
it. I could see similar things of
all these here in Gen. AI as well.
I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you the question.
I'm sure that's on everybody's mind is that, you know, paying
Identity and Ford Rock came together to create this super
company, super identity company. And with everything that's going
on with AI as a little thing that's happening in the
background, what does the product road map look like?
Is it a merger of these two platforms?
Is it they each have their own road map?
How? How's it going to work in the
future? Ping and Ford Rock had sort of a
common base sort of actor between our products.
We can you know both be innovating.
So the core access management functionality we have, we're
basically continuing to support that across our customer base,
whether you're on the Four Drop, original 4 Drop platform or
whether you're on the original Ping platform, sort of Ping
Federate or you know Access Manager, those will continue to
evolve and we'll invest in those going forward.
So they're not going anywhere. We also had tenant cloud
infrastructure that Four Drop had built out that we are
continuing to support as well as on the Ping side.
And then Ping had basically invested in our Ping One multi
tenant SAS platform that we're continuing to invest in.
So now that it's changing all of that is, is, is, is continuing
forward. On the Ping side, we've been
innovating more in the area of threat protection, identity
verification, whereas on the Ford Rock side, they'd be more
innovating in areas of identity management, life cycle
management, those areas. So we now basically bring all of
that stuff together and I I think we've got actually a
pretty exciting and fairly broad platform that we can actually
talk to people about. Right now.
Yeah, I agree. I mean, from my standpoint,
these were two really good products and each had their own
strengths and some overlap. But you know, each of them were
showing their own areas. I can't speak for your
customers, but if I were to try, I would say exactly what you
said, which is don't repeat what Oracle did because I was there
for that and you know I there were I I don't want to get
myself in trouble by by saying what I really think, but I'm
going to say don't repeat what they did and I'm sure you can
get plenty of perspective on what that was.
Ping sort of took an approach where we wanted to be very we
we're sort of expecting it. Was IT driven, Admin driven?
We need it to be fairly easy to use and configure essentially
with the approach, whereas we want to make it very flexible,
very easy for developers to interact and use it so they can
get comfortable. Now obviously there's overlap
here. This isn't the perfect
distinction. It's like kind of like a van.
But that's still why I I'm sort of comfortable that we have the
right tool no matter what situation that is.
Yeah. It's kind of a lot like the the
distinction you made there of IT driven versus developer driven
reminds me a lot of the Octa Auth 0 combination Octa, IT
driven, all 0 developer driven, a lot of similarities.
And obviously, a lot of their customers were kind of upset
that we didn't have something sooner, but we were sort of, you
know, trapped a little bit because we actually couldn't
talk to Ford Rock until we actually had permission, you
know, after the Justice Department approved it.
So we sort of had a standing start to actually make that
happen. But yeah, I think it's actually
turned out well. I culturally the the Ford Rock
and team teams are very, very similar culturally.
So that it it hasn't been an issue in terms of bringing
these, you know, everybody together and sort of now you
know working as one team. I've always been impressed by
the the the the the talent and the work at at at Ford Rock.
I've known a number of them for a long time.
So it's actually quite fun out of you working with a bunch of
these guys too. Guys and gals too, actually.
So it's great. It's never a dull moment in the
identity business. And this is what I like to say.
This is exciting when you see like companies come together
like that and and see what turns out of it.
But I think we'll probably leave it there, Patrick, because I
know you're a very busy guy, but we definitely want to end a
lighter note. I want to ask you a golf
question because I know you play golf.
If you could play a round of golf with any historical figure,
who would it be and why? So I had to spend a little time
thinking about that. So one of my heroes as a kid
watching golf was a guy called Greg Norman who's kind of like a
kind of got a little bit of a issue going on right now with
live golf. But back in the day he was
pretty good and he he, he obviously had some challenges
and ups and downs and stuff like that.
But I it would be fascinating to be able to spend some time with
him, just, you know, learning about what his experiences were
like, the challenges he faced back in the day.
So that'll probably be the guy I I'd be most interested in
playing with, I think called a hero of mine.
So that's kind of why. It's interesting you selected
another golfer, which I think is kind of cool.
Jim, How about yourself? Who would you pick to play
around in golf with? It's great that you said that
because I was thinking the same thing because I picked a a
person who I'm pretty sure could beat in golf.
But it's probably my favorite historical character, which is
Abraham Lincoln. I mean if you obviously all the
things he did, but also the the things he said, you've realized
this person was operating at like a genius level
intelligence. But I also think I could wolf
them pretty good in golf, because golf wasn't even the
concept back in the 1860s. So but we'd have a good time
together. Maybe enjoy a few beers during
the during the rounds as well. What about you, Jeff?
Let's see, I would I'm, I'm going to go back to Leonardo da
Vinci only because I want to see where the human race would be
with some of the concepts that we're bringing from golf with
like dynamics and physics and things like that.
And just see how much, how, how how further along could we've
accelerated human, human beings with that knowledge shifted
forward, you know, a few 100 years.
That's the way that I would look at it.
I think that's probably a good spot where we'll be at for this
week. Patrick, thank you so much for
spending time with us today and looking forward to
conversations. Hopefully we'll see you at an
upcoming conference. Jim, as always, a pleasure.
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So it'll be all there in a nice neat little package for people
to check that afterwards. So with that, we'll go ahead and
leave it for this week. Thanks everyone for listening
and we'll talk with everyone in the next one.
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