So I, I have a few slides and, and hopefully we'll have a little bit of time for Q and a, but I do wanna set a little bit of an agenda about what some of the dynamics are in the industry. And, you know, some of my experience with, with identity, and certainly the last few years, I've been hearing a lot from the executives that I've been talking to regarding what they're doing to further their business.
You know, this whole aspect of digital transformation is, is a, you know, huge strategic effort at a lot of companies right now. And in a couple of facts that I've highlighted here is just how important this is to customers.
You know, when you, when you hear that 92% of firms are, are, you know, shifting budget to better, to better expand their digital transformation efforts when they're planning on increasing their digital transformation budgets, or when they consider like, you know, this top point, which I think is the most important 94% people think that digital transformation is essential to the companies, to their company's future success.
So it's really something that's front and center with, with many companies, boards of directors and many companies, not senior executives.
And then the other thing in this sort of speaks a little bit more to my experience in doing identity management and being involved in many different identity management companies over the years. One, I think very clear fact is, I mean, literally, you know, it's hard to say a hundred percent, but 99 out of a hundred companies that I've ever talked to all want integration with an ITMs ITSM system.
There are so many systems out there that don't have provisioning capabilities or don't have APIs, or don't have web services capabilities that there's this whole last mile of things that need to be provisioned or deprovisioned or work that needs to be done on behalf of a end end user, a task. So, you know, there's always this, this, Hey, we, we have to do this.
We have to have this our I T SM system integrated with, with our identity and access governance or identity and access management system.
Another thing that I've noticed, you know, since 1993, I tell the story of a, of a, of a company I met back in my first year at zoom at who was doing a IM project and basically didn't choose us. But a couple of years later, I heard back from the same person at the same company. They were now taking that product out and putting in another one.
And we, we bid on that and, and literally this company who I've known for quite some time, one of the, the major credit card companies is on their fourth or fifth rip and replace right now. And this is more commonplace than, you know, you think I've seen it over and over again. And it's something that actually bothers me a little bit, to be honest, because, you know, people put so much effort into this.
You know, a, another thing is there's been a ton of identity standards over the, over the last few years, but, but one of the biggest problems is there's no actual sort of platform standards.
And what I mean by that is when a, when a customer builds a workflow or, or, or a customer integrates with a system, the way that you do that is varied different from one I am, or I IGA solution to another, it's not standardized L a is standardized. Sure. Sam is standardized. Sure. But workflow how you connect and, and how you use AI, how you use ML, not standardized. So anytime you, you know, you're thinking about changing vendors, you have a problem because all that effort and, and, and time and money is basically solved.
So, you know, the other thing is, which is an interesting parallel to, to something like service now is there's just a huge amount of time and effort on reengineering business processes.
So it almost makes sense.
You know, when I looked at all these things to say to myself, well, well, you know, rather than using something like service now, or thinking about ITSM as the last mile, why couldn't it be, you know, maybe the first mile or where you start also some of the other problems around IJ, which, which, which have become apparent, you know, as things have evolved is, you know, the costs and the infrastructure associated with, with IGA, whether it's software costs, the investment in servers or the investment in, in cloud, the fact that you have to go out and hire people who are specialized in that particular vendor's product, you need partners that are experiencing that particular vendor's pro product.
And ultimately what ends up happening is, you know, it becomes very difficult for you to achieve that ROI that you, that you have basically promised to, to the customer.
And another thing, and Martin mentioned this a little bit is the employee experience employee experience is getting more and more important. Maybe just one of the many pieces around multichannel experience, partner, experience, customer experience, user experience, and every time you change platform or any platform that you typically use, you have to be trained on that.
You have new tools, you have new interfaces, all of these things basically hamper employee productivity. And again, another sort of, you know, liminal moment for me was hearing, starting to hear over the last few years, customers say, Hey, could you make the interface look like ServiceNow? All of our, all of our employees like that interface, they know what it, what it takes to work with on a daily basis. We wanted to look that way, so we don't have to retrain people.
And, and then the other thing which I think is really key is this whole aspect of the identity management silo of all this information for your IGA product, being outside of, you know, what the company is going through from a digital transformation perspective.
You know, one of the key things about digital transformation is trying to simplify architectures, reduce silos, pull together a common data plane for actions across an organization, building these workflows as, as, as Martin mentioned across all these pieces of data.
And it's really difficult to do that when you have these silos of data, because there are more places to break and more things to be concerned about and more integrations that you have to have. So, you know, in, in thinking about all this in all of these issues, what we wanted to do was, was start focusing on IGA innovation. And I mean, that's for me is what I would rather do. I would rather be working on, you know, the, in the innovation part versus the, the building block part.
You know, my last, my last role, when I was at another company, we spent a lot of time worrying about, you know, what kind of database do we build our product on?
What's, what's the workflow engine that we're gonna use? What about the reporting engine? What about the end user? Porwal what are all these things and how do we build them?
We spend a tremendous amount of time on that when I really wanted to spend my time on things like, you know, access requests and access reviews, where the, where the real value was, and then a lot of customers and a lot of vendors start thinking about having I IGA on, you know, infrastructure as a service. So that does simplify things. If you run a solution in the cloud and it's on AWS, or it's on Azure, or, or it it's on the Google cloud, you don't have to worry about things like the operating system, you know, the network and the firewall and those kind of things.
And that, and there is a bonus to that, but at the same point in time, you're still worried about all these other things from an IGA, as an IGA vendor, you still have to build a reporting engine. You still have to build a workflow engine and a scheduler and all those kind of things.
And it's, again, detracting a little bit from the parts that I think you want your identity vendor to be the expert and spending most of their time on.
So the, the, the fascinating thing to me was when I started thinking about, and, and discussing with clear sky about ServiceNow as a platform, as a service, because when you really look at ServiceNow and you look at what its capabilities are, you start to see that it has all of these base capabilities that I don't particularly isn't identity vendor want to have to fool around with.
I don't really want to have to be worried about the database and the scheduler. In fact, I don't even wanna be worried about the workflow engine. I just wanna use it a great workflow engine, same for reporting, same for, for the end user Porwal. So what we're really trying to do a clear sky is let's service now be service.
Now, let it be the expert in all the things that it does well, and let us basically manage the things which, which as an identity vendor, I think is where as a, you know, I want to spend my time and my intellectual capacity with my team, figuring out all these different things as best possible.
I also think as a customer, that's probably where you would like us to be spending our time too, on a lot of these different things.
So, you know, I wanna just for a few minutes, talk about service now, because I did not know a lot about ServiceNow before working at clear sky. I did some investigation and, and, you know, as an employee, when I was in my, in the last couple of companies, I've been at you service now for day to day activities, if you need to order something, or if you need to get an entitlement or access to something or, or get a printer fixed was, you know, commonplace and, and everyone knew how to use it, how to use the application, catalog those kind of things.
But when I kinda look behind the curtain to see who service now was, in all honesty, I was really blown away cuz I had no idea.
This was a 4 billion company. I had no idea that they had so many customers around the world.
They've, they've got about 11,000 employees and about a third of those or in R and D when they spent three quarters of a million on R and D or quarters of a billion dollars on R and D in 2019. And, and I think a couple of the other things that just, you know, were, were really amazing to me is 3 million daily active users and 20 billion customer transactions per month.
I mean, literally in every job that I've had, people are asking us about our, our, our SAS platform. Does it scale prove it, how many people can it support? Do you have data centers in my location? Where are your data centers around the world? What are your redundancy capabilities? What are your certifications? And all of these things ServiceNow already has and already does to support these users.
I mean, literally blew me away. The other thing, and I think this is really key and I think Martin touched a little bit about it and I certainly Jessica from ServiceNow did so now was way more than I TSM. It's all of these other capabilities too. Most of the, most of the customers started obviously with I T SM that is where service now started, but they've got GRC governance, risk and compliance. They've got dev security operations, you know, it operations management, they've got a ton of integrations with, with different platforms, pretty amazing stuff.
And then of course the other thing, you know, which really, which, which really amazed me and, and, and made me think really seriously about service now as a platform, as a service was the fact that they were, they were in leadership positions and in many of these different, different product lines and, and solutions and in some cases, visionaries, and some of them also, and we started to see more and more customers that we would talk to that that had ServiceNow HR or ServiceNow, GRC, or SecOps.
And we're looking at how they could basically enhance that.
You know, when I looked at all these things, I thought, you know, this is a really interesting opportunity for a vendor like clear sky to build something on top of this platform and leverage all these, this capability that ServiceNow is building and working on in, in, in, in a number of my last positions, you know, we've had to hire our own, you know, people who are smart in data science and artificial intelligence and machine learning and, you know, workflows and user experience. Well, we don't, we don't need to do that now.
And as I mentioned, that last slide, we get to concentrate on those things, which are, are of most value to us.
So clear sky, what we're trying to do is accelerate a company's identity, digital transformation. And the way that we want to do that is build on ServiceNow, which is, is truly a transformative cloud based workflow engine and digital transformation platform. I think it's an, an amazing platform leverage the workflows and business processes that people are already inventing.
I mean, if you really think about it, part of digital transformation is reinventing your business. And, you know, as, as well stated earlier behind every great experience is a great workflow.
So we're, we definitely wanna leverage that. And we also wanna just remove that whole need for a standalone identity platform, whether it's standalone on premise, as Paul was talking about earlier, or whether it's standalone in the cloud, you know, you don't need that investment. You've already made an investment in ServiceNow and you've already got that capability carry on with it.
So from a, a general capabilities perspective, clear sky has a, a, a very broad set of capabilities for its identity governance and access product. On the now platform. We actually operate as part of the now platform. We're not integrated with we're built on the now platform.
We can, we can help with identity, life cycle management, access request, access, review, workflow management, all of those general capabilities.
So as we, as we like to say, everything is better when identity governance is built and lives on ServiceNow and in ServiceNow, you can govern all business applications. Like I said, everybody wants to integrate their business applications and all of these systems with I T SM in the end, it's one Porwal for everything. It's a native product on the now platform. It's not integrated it's cloud delivered with on-premise flexibility.
And as I mentioned, there's proven scalability and security. And I think back to the point about, you know, every great experience is a great workflow. ServiceNow is the smarter way to workflow, and we, we wanna leverage all of those different capabilities.
I think this is one thing that I, I, I really like about ServiceNow is we have all of these different products, whether as I mentioned before, ICOM, or GRC or HR, or, or our product for that matter on the ServiceNow platform.
And basically ServiceNow is, is managing everything for us and for their own products, secure and governed data access to all of data near zero maintenance as a service virtually unlimited performance and scale. And the key thing, which is really important is it's one platform, one copy of data and many workloads. So there's this data plane parted green, where all this data is secured and governed by the ServiceNow platform that the different products can access.
And, and we think that's where there's a tremendous amount of value for customers in, in the fact that we're sitting with that data and we're integrating with that data.
So we believe identity governance belongs on service.
Now it's, it's, it's a, a very different conceptual way of thinking about things. We, we totally believe in the now platform for digital transformation. It is the thing that's connecting people, functions and systems to help our, our customers, to help companies in general, to drive innovation, business agility, and on productivity. And I wanted to kind of finish with sort of a little bit of a call to action in, in, you know, thinking about this. I really wanted us to be able to help customers join the digital transformation revolution.
That's going on to pull identity up from being a tactical, competing with other security programs for below the line budget, to being part of something that's really strategic, you know, get out from being just part of it in the, in transform into the business, not be as it staff focused, employee customer and, and partner focused really pull identity.
As I say, here from being tactical to strategic.
And I think the other thing to do is recognize in a lot of ways that the technical, the process, the data and architectural debt that you are presently incurring as an identity silo is strangling. You, you know, you've built workflows that are specific to your IGA solution. You've built workflows that are different than what's on the ServiceNow platform processes different. The data is different. The technical aspects of the, of the product are different. The AI is different. As I mentioned, the machine learning is different. All of these things are architectural debt.
So I think from our perspective, we really feel strongly that, that this is, is, is something that releases you and allows a company like us to work on those really important identity governance administration, identity management capabilities at the top, and not have to worry about all of the other architectural issues, process issues, workflow issues. That's all handled by service. Now. I think there's probably enough time. I hope for a question or two, I'd be happy to.
