from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation vibrator this is Dave Volante and welcome to this special cube conversation as you know I've been running a CXO series now for several weeks really trying to understand how leaders are dealing and coping with the Cova 19 crisis today we want to switch gears a little bit and talk not only about how leadership has sort of navigated through this crisis but also start to imagine what it's going to look like coming out of it I'm going to introduce you to a company that have been talking about now for the last well six to nine months company called octave as you know from my previous breaking analysis this is a company that not only is in the security business they really kind of made their mark with identification management but also really there's a data angle normally when you think about security you thinking about auto security it means that less user flexibility it means less value from the user standpoint what what octa has done really successfully is bring together both endpoint security as well as that data angle and so the company is about six hundred million dollars in revenue they've got an eighteen billion dollar valuation which you know may sound kind of rich at 30 X a revenue multiple but as I've reported the company is growing very rapidly I've talked about the you know the rule of 40 octa is really a rule of 50 type of company you know by that definition they're with me here to talk about the product side of things as dia jolly who's the chief product officer yeah thanks so much for coming on the cube I hope you're doing okay how are things out in California things are going well good to meet you as well Dave I hope you're doing well as well yeah we're hanging in there you know the studios are rocking the cube you know continues our daily reporting I want to start with your role you're relatively new to octa you've got a really interesting background particularly understanding endpoints you're at Google Google home of Google Nest you spent some time you know worrying about looking after Xbox do you a good understanding of what's going on in the marketplace but talk about your your role and how specifically you're bringing that to enterprise sure so I drove about this I I say that I've done every kind of known product management imaginable the man at this point I'm done both Hardware Don software so dealt a lot with endpoints as you talked about that a lot with sass dealt with consumer dealt with enterprise and all over the place completely different sizes so after really my role as a chief product officer is to be able to understand and what our customers need right and what are the challenges they're facing and not just the challenges they're facing today but also what are the challenges that they'll face tomorrow that they don't even know about and then help build products to be able to overcome that both with our engineering teams as well as with our sales engineering team so that we can take it to market now my background is unique because I've seen so many identity being used in so many different ways across so many different use cases whether it's enterprise or its consumer and that given that we covered both sides spectrum I can bring that to bear yes so what I've reported previously is that that you guys kind of made your mark with with identification management but in terms of both workforce but also customer identification management which has been I think allowed you to be very very successful I want to bring up a chart and share something that I've I've shared a lot of data with our audience previously some guys if you bring that up so this is data from enterprise Technology Research our data partner and for those who follow this program you know we we generally talk in in two metrics a net score which is a measure of spending momentum and and also market share which really isn't real market share but it's it's pervasiveness in the survey and what you can see here is the latest April survey from over 1200 CIOs and IT practitioners and we're isolating on an octa and and we brought it back to July 15 survey you see a couple of points here I want to make one is it something to the right this is pervasiveness or market share so octa in the market is doing very very well it's why the valuation is so high what's driving the growth and then you can see in the green a 55% net net score very very strong it's one of the leaders in security but as I said it's more than than that so dia from a product standpoint what is powering this momentum sure so as you well know the world is working from home what after does is it provides Identity Management that allows you to connect to any technology and by any technology it primarily means technology technology that's not just on premise like your applications on-premise old-school applications or into software that's on premise but it also means technology that's in the clouds of SAS applications application infrastructure that's in the cloud etc and on the other hand it also allows companies to deploy applications where they can connect to their customers online so as more and more of the world moves to work from home you need to be able to securely and seamlessly allow your employees your partners to be able to connect from their home and to be able to do their work and that's the foundation that we provide now if you look at if you we've heard a lot in the press about companies like zoom slack people that provide online collaboration and their usage has gone up we're seeing similar trends across both octa as well as the entire security industry in general right and if you look at information recently since over to started phishing attacks have increased by six hundred and sixty seven percent and what we've seen in response is one of our products which is multi-factor authentication we've experienced in eighty percent growth in usage so really as Corvette has pushed forward there was a trend for people to be able to work remotely for people to be able to access cloud apps and but as ubered has suddenly poured gas on the fire for that we're seeing our customers reaching out to us a lot more needing more support and just the level of awareness and the level of interest raising let's talk about some of the trends that you guys see in the marketplace and like to better understand how that informs your product or you know roadmap and decisions you know obviously this cloud you guys have made a really good mark in the cloud space you know with both your your operating model your pricing model the modern stack the other is a reference that upfront which data talked a lot about digital transformation digital us data course the third is purity related to trust we've talked a lot on the cube about how the perimeter is there is no particular anymore the Queen is left her castle and so what are the big trends that you see the big waves that that you're riding and how does that inform your product directly sure so a few different things I think number one if you think about the way I've phrase this is or the way I think about it is the following any big technological trend you see today right whether it's the move the cloud whether it's mobile whether it's artificial intelligence intelligence you think about the neural nets etc or it's a personalized consumer experience all of that fundamentally depends on identity so the most important the so from a from being an identity provider the most important thing for us is to be able to build something that is flexible enough that is broad enough that it is able to span multiple uses right so we've taken from a product perspective that means we can follow two philosophies we can either the try and go solve each of these pain points one by one or we can actually try to build a platform that is more open that's more extensible and that's more flexible so that we can solve many of these use cases right and not only can we solve it because there's it extensible our customers can customize it they can build on top of it our partners can build on top of it so that's one thing that's one product philosophy that we hold dear and so we have the Octagon cloud which is a platform which provides both workforce identity as well as customer identity using the same underlying components the same multi-factor authentication we use for workforce we package up as an SDK so that our customer identity customers that's number one the second thing is you rightfully mention is data you can't really secure identity without data so we have very we have a lot of data across our customers we know when the users logging in we know what device they're logging in front we know the security posture on the device we know where they're logging in from we know their different behaviors were apps they go into or during wartime of the day etc so being able to harness all this data to say hey and apply ml model squared to say hey is the user secure or not is a very very core foundation of our product so for example we have what we call risk-based authentication you can not only do things like hey this user seems to be logging on from a location they've never logged on from but you could even do things like well you may not want to stop the user they may be traveling so instead of just asking them for a for a password you ask them for a multi-factor right so that's the other piece of it and in many ways data and security and usability are three legs of a triangle the more data you have the more you can allow a user you more security you can provide a user without creating more friction so it's sometimes helpful for the audience to understand a company in a edit Avant act in the landscape so the obvious platform out there is Active Directory now Microsoft with Azure Active Directory you know really you know trying to and and that's really been on their platforms but with api's you know Microsoft has got a thumbs in every pie how does octave differentiate from some of the other traditional platforms that are out there and and what gives you confidence that it and you can continue to do so going forward post kovat that's it that's a fantastic question Dave um so I think we divide if you think about our competitors on the workforce side we've got Microsoft and a couple of other competitors and on the customer Identity side really it's a bill versus buy story right most companies customer identity internally so let's take workforce first Microsoft is the dominant player there they've got Active Directory they've now got Azure Active Directory and from a Microsoft perspective I think Microsoft is always been great at building products or building technology that interconnected run the world is going to more there's more and more technology proliferation in the world and the way we differentiate is by becoming a neutral and independent platform so whether you're on a Microsoft stack whether you're on a Google stack whether you're on an amazon stack we are able to connect with you deeply we connect just as well with all 365 as they connect with Salesforce as we connect with AWS right and that has been our core philosophy and not only is that a philosophy for other when other vendors it's a philosophy for ourselves as well we have multi-factor authentication so do many other providers like duo if you want to use ours great if you don't want to use ours with our platform who use the one that's best for your technology and I think what we've always believed in from a product perspective is this independence this neutrality this ability to plug-and-play any technology you want into a platform to be able to do what you want and the technology that's best for your business's need so what's interesting what you said about the sort of make versus buy that's particularly relevant for the customer identification management because let's say you know I'm buying from Amazon I've got Amazon they know who I am but if I understand it correctly customers now are able to look across brands maybe cohort selling maybe make specific offers analyze the data that's an advantage that you bring that maybe do it yourself doesn't Frank maybe talk about that a little bit sure so really if you think about if you think about a bill versus buying even ten years ago life used to be relatively simple maybe 15 years ago you had a website you as your username your the password you weren't really using you don't have multiple channels you didn't have multiple devices as prevalent you didn't have multiple apps in a lot of cases connected to each other right and in that in that day and age password was fairly secure you weren't doing a lot of personalization with the user data or had a lot of sensitive user data so building a custom identity solution having your customer managing your customers identity yourself was fairly easy now it's becoming more and more hard number one I just talked about the phishing attacks they're an equal number of attacks on the customer identity side right so how do you actually secure this identity how do you actually use things like multi-factor authentication how do you keep up with all the latest in multi-factor authentication touch ID face ID etcetera and that's one the second thing we provide is scale for a number of companies we also provide the ability to scale dramatically which scaling identity and being being able to authenticate someone and keep someone authenticated in real time is actually a very big channel challenge as you get to more and more scale and then the last thing that you mentioned is this ability we provide a single view of the user which is super super powerful because now if you think about one of our customers Albertsons they have multiple different apps there are multiple different digital experiences and he don't have a siloed view of their customer across all these experiences here one identity for your customer that customer uses that one identity to log on to all your digital experiences across all channels and we're able to bring that data back together so if Albertsons wants to say hey somebody shot a in or bought something in one particular app but I know people that buy this particular object like something else that's available in another app they can give a promotion for it or they can give a discomfort that's so that makes a lot of sense I went into the PR platform get our data partner and I looked at which industries are really showing moment so remember this survey focus was run right in the heart of the the Cova 19 pandemic from from mid-march the mid April so it's a good of good current data point and there were four that stood out large companies healthcare and pharma telco which is courses this work-from-home thing and then consumer the example that you just gave from Albertsons is really you know sort of around that consumer there are a lot of industries that obviously been hit airlines restaurants hospitality but but these four really stood out as growth areas despite the kovat 19 pandemic I want to ask you about octane you just got it had your big user conference anything product specific that came out of that that our audience should know about I mean I'm an interested in access gateway I know that wasn't necessarily a new announcement but Cloud Gateway what were the highlights of some of those things from a product stamp yeah of course so we did we did made a very difficult decision to pivot octane virtually and we did this because a number of our customers are given what they're facing with the Kovach pandemic wanted to hear more around news around what our product launches are how they could use this with cetera and really I'd say there are three key product launches that I want to highlight here we had a number of different announcements and it was a very successful conference but the three that are the most relevant here one is we've always talked about being a platform and we've set this for the past four or five years I think and but over the last your and going into the next couple of years we're investing very very heavily in making our platform even more powerful even more extensible even more customizable and so that it can go across the scenarios you described right which is whether you're on Prem with Auto access gateway or you're in the cloud or in some kind of hybrid environment or you using some mix-and-match or work from home people in the office etc so really what we did this year over the last year was deepen our platform footprint and we started releasing the four components available in a platform which we call platform services so we have six components and we were directories that is customizable and and flexible so you can build your own emails except for N equals four users adds information related to them we have an integration platform that we've made available at a deep level where where our customers can use SDKs tools etc to be able to integrate with octa in a platform which we've talked a lot about and then we released three new platform services and one was what we call arc identity engine we had released we talked about this last year and this year we talked about it last year from a customer identity perspective this year we brought her into our workforce identity but also what that does is it allows you a lot more flexibility for situations like we're in right it allows you flexibility to define security policies at the parabola it so you could decide hey for my email I don't want my customers to have to use a multi-factor authentication for but for Salesforce I would definitely want them to use a multi-factor authentication if they're not in the office and it also allows you to have a lot more flexible factor recovery so for example if you forgot your password one of the biggest pain points of co-ed has been the number of helpdesk costs have been rising through the roof the phone calls are ringing nonstop right and one of the biggest reasons for helpdesk are says oh I can't login I got locked out either lost a factor or L forgot my password it helps with that um so that's one set of announcements the second set of announcements was we launched a brand new devices platform and personally this is my personal favorite but really what the devices platform allows you to do is the feature in it that we launched is called Fast Pass and what phosphorous allows you to do is it actually takes phosphorous to the next level it allows you to basically use logging into your device and us understanding the posture of the device and all the user context around you to be able to log you directly dr. then I imagine if you're on a Mac or a iOS device or an Android or a Windows device just being able to face match into your iOS or being able to touch ID into your Windows hello and you're automatically logged into lockdown right that is that and and the way we do that is we have this client on across all these operating systems that can really understand the security posture of the device it can understand of the device is managed if it's safe if it's jailbroken if it's unmanaged it can also connect with multiple signals on the device so if you have an EDR and MDM vendor we can ingest those signals and what they think of the risk we can also ingest signals directly from apps if apps things like um G suite and Salesforce actually track user behavior to determine risk they can pass those signals to us and then we can make a decision on hey we should allow the user to authenticate directly into octa because they've authenticated their device which we can make a decision that says no let's provider let's ask them to step up with a multi-factor authentication or we can say no this is too risky let's deny access and all of this is configurable by the IT admin they can decide the risk levels they're comfortable with they can decide the different risk levels by different apps so that was another major announcement and then and as a product person you rarely ever get the chance to actually increase security and usability at one time which is why it's my favorite you increase both security and usability together now the last one was action was a workflows engine we call it workflows lifecycle management and we it's really we launched a graphical no cord user interface identity is so important so many business processes for our customers there's so many business processes built an identity for example if someone joins her company you usually either have a script that allows them access to the applications they need to or you actually have an IT admin sitting in there trying to manually provide access or when they leave right what workflow lifecycle management or lifecycle management workflows allows you to do is it actually allows you to provide it actually provides you the no core graphical user interface where you can build all these flows so now you don't need someone that knows coding you can even have a business unit so for example I for me in the product for the product org I can have someone say hey building a business process similar it's something you would build in sort of like an iPad and allow everyone that comes in to be able to have access to fig mom because we use pigma a lot right those are the kinds of things you can do and it's super powerful and it takes the ability of our already existing lifecycle management product to the next level well thank you for that that's that summary dear so I want to kind of close with I mean those of you have been following the cube for a while there I think there's some similarities between octa and and and service now that obviously obvious differences but we started following you know ServiceNow pre-ipo is less than a hundred million dollar company and we've seen that company build out as a platform company and that's really what octa is doing here we're talking about a total available market that's yeah probably north of 50 billion so the the question I have he is you know what Frederic and pod started 11 years ago playing on the dynamics coming out of the financial crisis that got us to where we are today now you've got the challenge of you've achieved reached escape velocity now you've got this you know massive growth opportunity in front of you how do you see the product portfolio evolving expanding and I'm also interested in postcode with 19 you know no whiteboards no face-to-face contact not at least not for a while and how you're kind of managing through that but but how can we expect the product portfolio to expand over time what can you share with us so one of the given how pervasive identity has become and given how not just broad but at the same time deep it is there are multiple different places or product portfolio >> and a number of different places were thinking about right so one is you mentioned today we play in workforce identity and customer identity but we haven't even begun to talk about how we might play in consumer right one of the one of the biggest perk matter is consumers and consumers protecting their own identity so often an employee is not using their identity to lock the seals ports and you have an attack on a company and offered an employee actually logging into their Gmail their personal Gmail or their personal or some personal website that bank and they get and their credential get compromised in their fluency impossible so the more protective the more directly consumers the more we indirectly protect both enterprises from work from an employer as well as a customer perspective howdy we're an enterprise company so it doesn't mean that we are going to go direct to consumer there are ways to make employees more secure by what the director calls were so that's one the second thing is managing identities I think we've as the number of applications as the number of technologies are proliferate managing and an employee's life cycle who that governing that the life cycle is not administering etc is also fully stock also becoming very very challenging it was all well and good we'll never can ask and you were on that that's not true anymore an average company uses I think close to 200 applications and then if you broaden back to other resources like infrastructure there's a lot lock more so how do you actually build automated systems that based on the employee status based on their rule based on the project they're on provides them the right access for the right amount of time the third thing you mentioned is and you should pass on this initially but this is the there's this concept of zero security right and the perimeters disappeared how do you provide security so if you look at the industry at large today there are tons of different security vendors trying to provide security at each point if you talk to any see-saw out there it's really really hard to cobble all of this together and one of the things we were trying to do is we're trying to figure out how with our partners we can build a silly end-to-end solution for n - n zero trust for our customers so that's that's another area that the of the product portfolio we're pushing and then finally with the whole digital transformation and customer identity yes more and more companies want their customers to go back online yes more and more customers convenience of being able to interact online with Billy if you think about it the world has changed dramatically over the last three years with privacy laws with things like gdpr CCP etc how do you actually manage your customers obviously you actually manage their content how do you ensure that while you're using all this data from across these apps that we talked about here you and you're using for the first benefit how do you make sure that the minister private is secure and and how do you ensure your customers that's another major area that I think our customers are asking us for helping and so those are areas or so that you should be a big signature the next two to three years some of it will be through partnership that's generally that high-level directions we're headed in wealthy you so much for coming on the key on the key and sharing the product roadmap and some other details about the great company really interested in watching its continued ascendancy good luck in the marketplace and thank you for watching everybody this is Dave Villante you conversations we'll see you next time [Music]