Author: Lawrence Wolf, Partner
Earlier today – at the annual RSA Conference in San Francisco – we announced that Edgile received the honor of being named this year’s partner of the year by SailPoint, a leader in identity governance. As an advisor to organizations on identity risk, I feel not only proud but gratified. In any market, success is often predicated on taking bets, even if those bets are on trends concerning risk. Looking back on our long relationship with SailPoint, there are three bets that Edgile made that led to our successful growth, and I’m proud to have been part of the decision-making.
The first was betting on the general consulting category: identity access and management (IAM). When I first joined Edgile, in 2012, the firm had already begun its upward climb as a leader in this strategic discipline. We saw an opportunity to accelerate growth specifically in this area and GRC. Working with leaders in the Fortune 500 of highly regulated industries, we saw how the worlds of IAM and GRC (governance, risk, and compliance) were beginning to merge. We saw that where these two were merging presented a sweet spot and our differentiator. My partners and I understood it would require being the best in something so critically important. Our bet on a new vision for IAM turned out to be a good one. Today, identity has come to be regarded as “the virtual perimeter of the enterprise” – to quote Don Elledge, Edgile’s CEO and co-founder – and we are positioned and prepared better than ever to serve the market.
SailPoint shared our vision, and we quickly began to grow with them. This being our second big bet: investing time and resources to better serve enterprise clients who were looking for ways to adopt and implement the SailPoint platform. What we saw was with SailPoint was the best in class at a time of industry consolidation. We learned from one another, and scaled with one another, as identity has moved from being on a checklist to being at the center of security strategy and operations.
None of that would have mattered, if we hadn’t made a third bet: on becoming a trusted advisor not only to our clients but to our technology partners like SailPoint. This statement can be overused, but it is the guiding principle at Edgile. This has helped us become a national firm with one of the leading identity practices today. We owe a debt of gratitude to our clients and partners for this achievement. As we have learned with other partners, there’s no better way to take a journey than with another organization you can trust.
Thanks for our friends and colleagues at SailPoint. The journey continues in 2017.