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GS Mag: You have just taken over the regional management of SailPoint. Can you tell us about your company?

Hervé Liotaud: SailPoint is a ’pure player’ in the identity management market. The company was founded in 2005 in Austin, Texas, from scratch but by people with rich experience in the market. In fact, the founders were the former creators of Waveset, which was set up in 1995, and acquired by Sun in 2002 to become the product SunIdM, the world’s most widely-used IAM solution. There are more than 500 of us working for SailPoint across the world and in the next few months we hope to see that number increase, especially in Europe. An employee at SailPoint has on average 6 years’ experience with IAM.
Our company offers three main solutions which are independent but can easily be combined: ’on premises’ IAM/IGA (IdentityIQ solution), ’cloud-based’ IAM/IGA (IdentityNow solution) and DAG (SecurityIQ). It’s a question of matching identity governance (Who has access to what? Is there compliance? Can that be proven? Review of access, implementing security policies, reporting) with Identity Administration (managing the life-cycle of identities: requests for access, password management, provisioning and de-provisioning), all including access to unstructured data and not just access to systems (Where is the sensitive data? Who has access to it? Who accessed what?)

GS Mag: What are your goals?

Hervé Liotaud: We are known in the market for managing large accounts and naturally we want to keep and even improve this position. Also, our new offers (IAM/IGA from the cloud and DAG) will allow us to expand our customer base to larger SMEs.
To do this, we’ve put together a team of experts made up of pre-sales and post-sales engineers, inside sales, marketing, partner manager, a Customer Satisfaction Manager and a sales force. For several years, we’ve had partners who are consulting firms and integrators with very high-added value that allow us to frame a project upstream before embarking on a phase of integration and deployment.

GS Mag: What does your offer consist of?

Hervé Liotaud: We don’t have a purely technological approach, but before any product launch we wish to include business lines so that they will support this approach. Our offer is highly skills-oriented and business-oriented, and is matched with our clients’ internal processes with the aim of facilitating user access management, while improving security at the same time. This approach also meets compliance requirements.

GS Mag: What is your message to our CISO readers?

Hervé Liotaud: CISO people have accumulated different solutions for perimeter security over the years. You have to say that the fundamentals are often handled badly, that is the overall management of managing access and rights for employees, sub-contractors, partners etc.; with the popular questions ’Who has access to what?’, ’Can you guarantee removing access when collaborators leave?’, ’Can you guarantee that collaborators don’t accumulate rights?’ Unfortunately these questions are still relevant, as the question of rights to access remains fundamental to IS security. As a ’pure player’, we have to excel in our field. There is no question that this is the reason that Gartner, for three consecutive years, has put us a long way ahead of the competition in its IAM and IAG magic quadrant.