All right. I thought that was a great talk and I I'm inspired in a lot of ways to try to figure out how we're gonna make the whole industry better.
And, and part of that is the topic that I'm gonna talk about, which is innovation. It's a subject that's particularly compelling to me. It's an area that I've worked on for 20 plus years, whether starting a way back when building covert and clandestine communication systems up through supporting folks like MasterCard and visa, and now doing product management with CA innovation is, is something that's important to us all now and, and, and critical to the success of what we're trying to get to.
I wanna start sort of a timeframe that was right before when my career started, I guess, which is 17th century. So the word innovation actually, as an interesting history in that way, back when being an innovator was not something you wanted to be take, for instance, in the 17th century, if you were accused of being an innovator that was equivalent to being called a her attack.
And the penalty for being an innovator in the 17th century was they would cut off your ears.
So not exactly the same thing that we've got today, where the people that we idolize, the people that we hold up and respect, we, we believe are innovative. The companies that we, we value, the companies who we believe are doing the right things are innovative. And so that innovation aspect is something that recognizing what it is and how it's changed over time is important. So it's no longer heresy to be an innovator today. It's somebody who's adding value. That change actually happened in the 1930s.
So in the 1930s, there was a recognition that there was a lot of quote invention going on, but only a small piece of that was actually worth following and was adding value. And the word that came to be used for that was innovation. That's an important concept that we're gonna work through as we go through the next slides and talk here about, it's not about just creating something new, it's creating something new, that's changing, fundamental beliefs like a heretic does at the same time, adding business value.
Why is it so confusing to understand what innovation is and what's coming at you and, and in part it's because as I've learned over the years, and many of you have probably noticed there's a lot of different forces that are driving the quote innovation that gets put in front of us. The things that people will say, I think this is the next big thing, or this is the thing you should be investing in, or this is the thing that you should be having your people work on. There's a lot of different forces that come at us no matter what role you're in, in our industry.
But let's start with maybe if you're the identity and access management executive inside of a company, you're motivated to keep those systems running, to keep the staff funded, to keep your technology budgeted. Those forces are, are inertia for you.
There are things that are gonna drive your activities. What you have coming against. You are folks like entrepreneurs. So folks who are actively trying to find the gap in the systems that you have, and to fill that gap as fast as possible with something that you'll pay for that force has direction.
It has momentum and understanding it as an identity, professional is important behind the entrepreneur is a venture capitalist or an investor. It's somebody who has less, if not, potentially no concern for the actual technology, but cares about the timeframe, cares about how much of a market can be grabbed, how quickly and so represent records, recognizing that the entrepreneur is motivated by the venture behind them, or the investor is important to you. Relationships that you are gonna wind up.
If you go after innovation, actively is working to make relationships with the venture capitalists, with the entrepreneurs, and similarly, another force that's coming at your developers.
So today we know that our industry and all industries are really centered around software and software development. Many of your own staff are developers. The developers inside the startup are, are making decisions and driving things. The developers inside large companies are making and deciding things.
Their motivation as developers is to do as little as possible with each of the increments that they're trying to get out the door. So if you've ever worked hand in hand with a development team, you know, that they strive for getting something that's achievable relatively in their eyes, easy to get to. And they do that more and more in a agile way, step by step. So that force is important to you because as you see the change of what's coming at you, it's driven a lot by what the development teams will produce and why they'll produce things in certain ways.
So we see that there are different forces coming at you. One of the most invisible forces of course, are the opponents. So you've got the bad guys. The bad guys are trying to figure out how to undermine your system, how to use it for alternate purposes, how to compromise it. Those forces are clear in that they have an effect and you have to react to them. The difference between those forces and the others is you can align yourself with the other forces. You can align yourself with the ideas of what are the VCs doing and potentially influence them. You can align yourself with small companies.
You can align yourself with partners, maybe big companies who are driven to be innovative, align yourself with those. Because what you wanna do is use that momentum of these other parties who are driving innovation. What you don't want to have happen is what would happen in this picture and does happen regularly in this environment in five minutes, the sun goes down and all of those bikes, none of them slow up, right?
So people are hurdling through space and they're careless in some ways, but also driven by where they're going. And if you get in their way, you're gonna get hit.
And it's the same in our own world with technology and innovation. So aligning yourself with partners is important. Another aspect, when you're going after innovation is recognizing your own strengths. And over the years, I can't tell you the number of times that I've worked with customers. I've worked inside of large organizations where they've set up strategies that have effectively played to, to issues or relied on factors that they were really bad at.
They've relied on the fact that they had to overcome a challenge, that their culture, their technology, their systems really would never let them command large companies and, and, and large enterprises are very good at specific things. Knowing what you're good at is important in the identity world, think about the fact that identity is infrastructure.
Identity is large. It's enabling, and it's quasi permanent in that the functionality inside of it is gonna be there a long time. What innovation is doing is figuring out how to get more value out of that core infrastructure.
So you may be very if, if your job is running infrastructure and identity and access management, your core strengths are keeping those systems running, operationalizing, the value that you get out of them. It's an important capability. What you're looking for is playing from a place of strength. Then to know that if that's your core strength, how do you augment it? How do you make it better with that thing that the entrepreneur has developed, or the big company has put in, in their product suite.
So playing from that place of strength is critical to the fact that you want to take advantage of innovation. The next thing you wanna do is you wanna supercharge things.
So getting back to the fact that the infrastructure itself doesn't go away, what you're really trying to do is to take that novel idea, that heresy and get more out of the thing that you have. And it can take a lot of different forms, but knowing yourself and knowing what you want to do here is the critical aspect. And it's probably at this point that it's worth actually taking examples and, and giving you an idea.
So as a product manager, and what, what we do at CA is we look across the great products that we have, right? So our legacy products and, and the products that are, you know, leaders in their own space, whether it's the Pam product, whether it's our SSO or site mind, you might know it by product or our advanced off product. We have a lot of technology and a lot of capabilities in these core products.
And what we are doing is innovating on those by adding capabilities like analytics.
So not throwing away the core capabilities that you've all come to rely on, not, not trying to reinvent the wheel or say, we'll throw everything out the window, but rather how do we supercharge these capabilities in a way that's really meaningful to you? So changing it as though it was heresay. So taking analytics, taking the power of data and saying, taking a control system. Now let's say Pam and turning it, not just into a way to enforce controls, but a way to actively monitor the activity of what's going on on your users, do detection of risk, do automated mitigation.
Additionally, providing more insight to the person who bought it and operates it. That's the power of analytics put into real purpose. So taking analytics and putting it inside of our Pam product changes the whole viewpoint of what that Pam product can offer to us to a, an enterprise.
And that's a creative use of how to take innovation and make it work in your environment. The other thing that we're doing is we're enabling new ways of delivery. So the fact that we have new use cases, including C I, a M we have internet of things, different delivery modes are needed to support these use cases.
And that's where you're starting to see us take core technologies and core capabilities and reapply up into them, new delivery modes. So enabling hybrid capabilities, where you have the ability for instance, to extend SSO, you're behind the wall. Single sign on capabilities can now be used seamlessly to access your SAS applications and your SAS services, but innovating in a way that's adjacencies are being drawn in.
Now, the other thing that I'll say that's important at this point is to recognize that perspective is important. It's very easy as identity professionals or folks working in an area to get very focused on the idea that if it's not marketed towards me, if it wasn't built for me, that it's a challenge, it doesn't really fit in my world.
I think this conference has done a great job actually, of bringing up some things that are obviously weren't built for the space, but offer that you can see them coming at the horizon potentially. And seeing if they're of value. Some of those are analytics.
Some of those are like the blockchain discussions that are going on. You know, they're, they're out there ways and we're looking to see how they apply, but that technology was built for a different space. We do similar things inside of our company.
So again, another practical example, the analytics that we put to work weren't developed specifically for the identity side of the world. So we have a very large business. We're a market leader in payment, securities and card credit card fraud detection. And it's actually that data science capability that we're drawing in and applying into our identity products. So it's looking across not just what's being built specifically for the identity space, but looking wider across what's being built for other markets and other use cases so that you can deliver a better product.
Now, this doesn't come without a cost. And over the years, you know, you, I think we all know that there are, when you try to do innovative things, you're taking the risk of failure. You're taking the risk that you're investing resources into something, and it's not gonna work out. This is a natural aspect of innovation.
It, and it, it scares people. And, and, and in some ways, I guess that's good, but as you, as technologists or system maintainers or decision makers are driving at things, you have to understand that you're gonna fail at something. And if you're not failing, then you're not innovating.
Another element to think about here is, is that if you're not in there trying to do things on a regular basis, if you don't have a policy, or if you don't have a way of driving your own people and your own technologists, to keep trying things, the idea that when the right thing pops up, you'll have the, the skills and the track record and the knowledge to take advantage of it.
The odds of that are incredibly low, what you really need to do.
And what we learned in different ways in doing innovation, whether in the us intelligence community, or as a startup CEO, or in CA is you have to actively be doing these things, taking that risk on some regular basis that says, I'll invest time and resources into this. I'll try something because in doing that, what you learn is how to monitor those things, how to react and recognize things fast.
You know, you'll hear startup guys use the word pivot to the point where you're so tired of it. You wish they just stopped saying everything right? But the reality is what the startup guys have learned is that by trying things and actively watching it and learning, they can figure out how to incrementally find their way to an answer that's of high value.
As, as people operating identity systems, that's incredibly important for us to do, right? So that's incredibly important for us to learn those skills and to recognize how to pivot and to do those things. So that's an important part of the success to innovation and such now pulling it all together. What we know is innovation is modern day heresay. It's the capabilities that really are gonna change and undermine what we do, but also provide real world business value, right? So it's not an arbitrary invention. It's something that's real value.
The second thing that we talked about was aligning yourself with the forces that are in the environment. So you're not gonna be able to swim against these guys. You're not gonna be able to survive without sort of paying attention to what are they doing. And then recognizing when some of them are going the same way you are and taking advantage of it.
Some of that is influencing them. Some of it is just really recognizing that it's going on. The third is playing from a position of strength.
You know, identity is infrastructure. What are you good at? What is the other technology gonna bring? That's gonna supercharge that for you and supercharging. It is the key just as we did with Pam. And as you'll see us do with our other products with analytics, how do you supercharge those capabilities to bring a new business opportunity to your customers? And the last is you've gotta actually act, you've gotta do it.
You've gotta learn how to try things in small places, how to apply them, how to train people, to take risks, to go to new customer bases and try new techniques and new new technologies. That's the way that you as a manager or you as a technologist, will figure out how to adopt new technologies and recognize when they're advanced, when they're suitable for the market, et cetera, but really incredible. So I'm gonna leave it there at this point.
I think it's a good point because we're leading into the award ceremony where a lot of people have done work, doing innovative things, expending a lot of sweat and effort. And, and with that, we can turn it over to questions.
Thank you. Great mark. Great overview. Thanks. I think there was a question. Do you think that analytics on, on top of existing security solutions will give the context that is needed for deploying an adaptive identity management
Solution? I I'll answer that.
Yes, but I'll, I'll also caveat it with, I love the word context and I believe that that's an incredible aspect of what analytics are really enabling for all of us. So they not only enable and expose new information so that the machines can make better decisions, but they enable the actual humans to understand the context of what's going on.
So when a, even a manual, let's say an intrusion or an incident response is going on, that they can go in and, and understand far better what's going on. So I do believe that analytics have a lot of value in doing that. A big part of the adaptive side that we've seen is the dynamic aspect of how do you change rules? How do you change, whether it's adaptive access controls or adaptive provisioning of access itself. So it is something that the analytics are doing today for us. And I think in the future, you're gonna see a lot more.
So it's, it's just the beginning, really of some great stuff.
Okay. Good to see. Thank you.
