A big thank you to everyone who reached out after my announcement about joining Ory. I was humbled by the support and enjoyed reconnecting to discuss why Ory is a compelling choice for IAM.
For those who don’t know me, I've spent considerable time in IAM with Yubico and SecureAuth, multi-cloud infrastructure with CloudBolt and Axway, and with vertically significant companies like AXON. My experience showed me the increasing complexities and needs equation of IAM, but I didn't realize just how much a fresh approach was needed.
From the Outside Looking In
Before joining Ory, I reached out to many of you to discuss current IAM challenges and the landscape as a whole. Some mentioned the months-long replacement cycles for workforce projects and most agreed that CIAM is still considered a huge challenge. CISO and CIO colleagues pointed out the market's frustration with rampant security issues and price hikes from incumbent providers in combination with the difficulty of switching IAM solutions. Many confirmed the value of the open-source community around Ory’s projects Kratos, Hydra, Oathkeeper, and Keto, praising the technology's excellence. Our investors (Balderton, Insight, and InQTel) appreciated the kudos our engineers receive from engineers and the flexibility we offer organizations to either 'own their own' identity stack or move to the Ory Network for speed, scale, and security. CISO colleagues also noted that trusting an IAM vendor’s compliance certification isn’t as robust as having the entire community verify how the software works. My research showed that Ory’s founders, engineers, and open-source community anticipated these issues over 8 years ago and developed a solution for today's IAM complexities. This made my decision to join Ory very easy.
From the Inside Looking Out
Since joining the company, I've heard common feedback from our open-source community and customers, such as ‘my current solution can’t meet my needs for scale or customizability’, ‘My current solution failed and continues to fail at peak times’ and ‘Ory is the only truly headless solution on the market.’ Investors echo these sentiments, praising Ory as a brilliantly extensible platform that addresses the complexities of web-scale IAM. Products and services struggle to perform at peak times — because they don’t have workflows in place that prevent failures and because they have close to zero visibility into why things are failing.
Our customers seek greater reliability and value from the front door to the solutions, content, and services they offer. New challenges are emerging for digital companies in a cookie-less world, where user relationships are constantly being disrupted. A flexible identity stack is needed to solve problems that incumbents have struggled with, accelerating the replacement of homegrown solutions, Auth0, Ping, Cognito, and others.
When engineers try Ory, they see a fresh, modern approach that is composable, headless, and easy to use. In every customer conversation, decision-makers note that Ory was preferred and selected by their IAM teams because they want to provide a better service for partners, customers, and employees. These engineering and IAM teams contribute to a vibrant community that stands for innovation, collaboration, and scalable identity solutions. Ory offers them the scale, customizability, and choice in deployment they need. Its an easy-to-try identity stack, you don’t have to Buy to Try, and you certainly don’t need to Pay to Use. Ory provides complete and unmatched flexibility out of the box.
I am thrilled to be part of the Ory community and look forward to our future together. Reach out if you want to learn more or think we can help you transform your IAM stack.