Q&A: Ping Identity CEO On Why Partners Should Get On Board With Identity Security

Andre Durand, Ping Identity

The identity and access management market is expected to hit $12.78 billion by 2020, up nearly double from $7.2 billion in 2015. With that growth comes a significant opportunity for partners, Ping Identity CEO Andre Durand (pictured) said, not only as the market continues to grow rapidly, but also as more enterprises look to center their security strategies around identity solutions.

Durand spoke to IT Best of Breed about the market opportunity on the heels of the company's Cloud Identity Summit this month, as well as news that the Denver-based company had been acquired by Vista Equity Partners. Durand said the acquisition, among other things, will allow Ping to focus on building the "holy grail of security" – an integrated platform based on identity solutions.

In the wake of the acquisition news, plus the growing attention and market size for the identity and access management space, here's what Durand -- in this interview with IT Best Of Breed -- said partners need to know about the market and how they can best take advantage.

I feel like we're hearing a lot more about the identity market lately. What's driving that? Where do you see the market going?

There's a paradigm shift in security and the paradigm shift is brought about by the adoption of cloud and mobile, which are shifting where the people and the assets are that we're trying to secure. Identity is becoming the steel threat of that new security paradigm.

Are the identity solutions the same as we might have seen in the past? Or are they changing to meet the new world of cloud and mobile?

They're definitely changing. You can't scale identity to the Internet if it's not based upon standards. We cannot scale a proprietary identity system to reach everything. That's changed. Where we consume the identity services is also evolving from the data center to the cloud over time … It's largely driven by reduced complexity, or desires for reduced complexity. The last thing is I think the user experience of identity is beginning to anchor itself on the mobile phone.

How do you see partners taking identity solutions to market most successfully?

Unquestionably, we're entering the era of identity solutions. No one platform covers all the use cases … You've got to package identity with enterprise mobility, and CASB and intelligence … We initiated it with the Cloud Defined Security Alliance that we manage with Optiv. It's really the Optiv and the larger global [systems integrators] who will drive the integration of these capabilities for these broader solutions.