Hey channel insiders, I'm your host Katie Bavoso and welcome to this episode of Partner POV brought to you by Dcope. AI tools continue to permeate the operations of businesses of all sizes in nearly every vertical. But are your customers identity and access management solutions keeping up with new risks without slowing down progress? Today, we'll learn how Dcope is making secure customer identity and access management an easy drag and drop process.
Plus, we'll hear from channel partner Trace 3 about its own unique experience working with Dcope. Now, let's hear from the people of the hour themselves. I'm joined by Rishi Bahargov, co-founder of Dscope, and Katherine Walther, vice president of innovation at Trace 3. Welcome to both of you. Thank you, Katie. Excited to be here. Yeah, thank you Katie. Thank you so much, Rishi. We're going to have you get us started. Let's first paint a picture of the customer identity and access management landscape.
What's impacting customer needs the most and where do traditional CIAM tools fall short? So Kitty, what we are hearing from a large number of our enterprise customers, startup customers, high growth companies is over the last 5 years, what matters most to them is the enduser experience. Can you onboard your customers really fast? Can you convert when customers come to the website? How is the mobile experience versus the web experience? And most of these CIM tools in past focused on the security aspects, focused on the developer experience aspect, but completely ignored the end-user experience aspect.
And this is very interesting. It's not just a B2C or a B2B problem, but it's also an AI related problem. Anybody implementing AI workflows need to worry about what is the user experience? Are you bothering the users too much when an agent tries to connect? So from our perspective, the biggest thing that we see customers complain about with the current state-of-the-art is can I improve the end user experience and can I actually use that improvement in the end user experience towards a business benefit whether it's a higher conversion on the commerce site whether it's uh better on boarding for a business any of the above.
Very well put Rishi and we're going to stick with you for this next question. Dcope prides itself on being both simple to implement and secure to use. Two very important things. How exactly is Dcope different from competing CIAM solutions in that way? And why is Dcop's platform more secure than if app developers maybe tried building a solution themselves from scratch? So I think the the big innovation we're bringing to the market is this concept of a flow.
So imagine flow is a visual representation of your user journey. And the user journey is show the login screen. Have a button which is connect to Google or have a login screen with a text box to pull in your phone number and then send an OTP. It could be anything. The idea is we let developers design the entire user journey including MFA flows, including login, including post authentication flows. And these flows can actually have connections to multiple security tools.
Now when you think of this as a flow, it does few things. Uh one, it actually gives the flexibility to the developers to customize their user journey to improve experience which I said is a big shortcoming in other tools. But second, it helps prevent developers making security mistakes like what if they forgot to put a critical step of checking an MFA or checking a device security. Is this a known trusted device? So once you have this in a visual manner rather than making mistakes in the code, they can say hey this is the journey.
This is the area that security is not okay. Here is where I want to enforce MFA. Here is the level of MFA I want. All of that becomes a visual journey. easy to audit, security teams can review it, security teams can give feedback, and then building homegrown, it's always a question, right? People are always in a rush to deploy, deliver on tight timelines, and there's shortcuts taken. And I think when you have a platform such as Dcope, it just gives you a much better structured framework to work with for your customer identities.
Very well put. Now, Katherine, we're going to move on to you for this next question. Trace 3 is a partner of Dcope, but let's get to know you a little bit deeper. What is your core mission at Trace 3 first of all, and what verticals do your customers typically operate in? Yeah, great question. So, Trace 3 is a leading consultancy and solution integrator. We typically work with CIOS, CISOs, and other technology leaders to turn big ideas into impactful outcomes.
So we typically work across cloud data security and even into innovation strategy and what really differentiates trace 3 is our unique ability to bring future forward to our clients. So through the innovation team which I have the pleasure of running we focus on identifying and evaluating emerging technologies and helping advise our clients to leverage those tools to solve real world problems which means we're constantly scanning the market for what's next.
We're constantly answering questions from clients to move their needle forward in an impactful way. In terms of the verticals that we that we really serve, it's a wide range of industries such as healthc care and pharmacy, entertainment and media, retail and e-commerce, financial services and tech is where you're going to find us mostly. I typically say we sit right in the Fortune 2000. I like that. I like that. So, Trace 3 has been in business. We have to say quite a bit longer than Dcope.
So I am curious to know how this partnership got started. What were your customers or internal teams asking for that made you turn to Dcope, Catherine? Yeah, it's a great question. So we typically sit pretty even between the investment community and the adoption community. the investment community being those from the venture community, some of those self-funded, the PE funded, even the the corporate venture community, as well as our clients that are asking us all of these questions.
And we had a client in particular that had a very pressing need to solve a problem that really they couldn't figure out a way to solve it any other way. And the and the path to it would have been a long, arduous, and would not have met timeline path. and we found Dcope as a result of that. So it did the partnership started very organically. We had a a client with a problem and we had an emerging solution that could solve that problem elegantly. And in the client's words, it did what it said it was supposed to do and it did it quickly.
And so this is what where we really started our relationship with them. And there's no better way than to start a relationship off within a huge success. So, you know, being able to overcome the legacy challenges of a CIM or a homegrown CIM, which which sometimes is is the case, and bring in a technology that was faster to integrate, that the security teams had the confidence in, it allowed us to really place faith in Dcope and into Rishi. It stood out immediately, honestly, and it gave our team a way to meet the demands without compromise.
Well, Katherine and Rishi, I'm glad. I've seen a lot of very positive head nods, so I know this partnership is for real. So, Katherine, as AI continues to be a game-changing trend in tech, from maybe streamlining workflows to helping generate revenue and also creating new risks, where do you see the CIA market struggling to innovate to keep up? And why is that such a big issue for your customers? It's such a great question because we're getting to the heart of I mean this challenge probably exists with other areas but since we're focusing in on CIM most of these tools were not built with AI use cases in mind and the identity environments have become so much more dynamic.
If you think about you as a user today, you can come into any application through a wide range of convenient, easy to get to login and legacy CIM tools were just not designed that way. And when we start to layer in agents and we start to think about what the future looks like when the agents are, you know, acting, we've provided agency to the agents to act on our behalf, we could be looking at, you know, unpredictable ways. This requires a smarter, a more contextualized identity decision-making process.
And in my opinion and experience, traditional CIA tools, they they lack that flexibility to integrate AIdriven logic or even respond to risks in real time. Rishi, with that in mind, can you explain how Dcope helps organizations adopt AI systems securely? So I think the the crux here is right I mean I I recently did a post of the analogy which is AI is becoming smarter delivering more value but it still needs the right guard rails because it's still probabilistic in nature non-deterministic in nature and it's almost by the nature of how these agentic workflows are designed they're going to do anything and everything to perform the task that a human wants them to perform or instructs them.
So now if you look at this construct to make sure that agents work in a secure and controlled manner you need to make sure that they get permissions to do their task. They get only the level of permissions that is really needed to do their tasks and then human is in the loop for giving those permissions and the human in the loop could be the person instructing could be the security teams could be the IT teams and the last thing is all of these transaction needs to be audited so that they can be reviewed later on and that's what Dcope provides.
Think of Dcope as the identity provider for this agent tech world or the new IDP for the agents. So that agents gets their identity. All of the transactions are approved by a human with the right controls and the right permissions and then govern all of those pieces with the right audit trail. Excellent. So going on from there, Katherine, back over to you. How is Dcope helping Trace 3 to futureproof its solutions and services as AI continues to grow in use?
Because as we've seen over the last two years, it's not slowing down anytime soon. No, in fact, it's actually getting faster. If you look at um you know the the conversation that we were just having that we're going to have in a little bit is around you know model context protocol and what we are seeing is clients who have moved a concept that was introduced at the end of last year into production at midyear and we need strategies to be able to manage the authentication layer of that and you want to talk about pure flexibility is in Dcope we are finding ways to solve this challenge we are finding that future flexibility that we need right now available.
So when we talk about how does it futureproof or how does the relationship with Dcope and Trace 3 futureproof our solutions we are partnering to provide answers that are very difficult to find. They're very difficult to um to to take a solution that isn't capable of evolving to today's needs even though today's needs just came out essentially yesterday. So their ability to support and evolve adding additional features, capabilities, application of the technology in ways that maybe we didn't even think about from the beginning.
So it's their evolution perspective that really aligns with our ability to futureproof. Rishi Dcope launched its official partner program in 2024. How important is the IT channel to Dcope and how are you investing in your partners like trace 3? Channel relationships are critical to DOP's go to market motion. In fact, I think from my perspective, one of the things that we do with every prospect, every deal that we review internally is like who's our channel partner, who can help us with delivering this solution in the best way.
Does the channel partner have the right expertise to consult the customer and guide them in the right direction? Because in our opinion, it's not just a software delivery, right? If you think about implementing or solving as as we started our jour introduction was like how did Katherine find Tcope because there was a real customer problem which her team heard about found our solution and then helped us deliver that solution to the customer. From my perspective the importance of a true channel partner is they have the expertise they understand the customer problems in some cases better than we do because they know the broader picture.
Dcope solves part of that. Dcope solves the CIM piece of it, but there may be a bigger transformation that is going on there. So I think all channel partnerships critical to us. We truly believe in channel partners being able to deliver expertise to the customer which goes beyond the software solution that we bring to the table. And speaking of your channel partners, Katherine, from the partners' perspective, how has Trace 3's partnership with Dcope enabled your business to grow and thrive? channel can be exactly what you make of it.
And I often refer to the folks at Dcope and Rishi as a model in terms of an emerging early technology that has leaned into channel in ways that are really modelesque. Our partnership with Dcope has been a growth enabler in every sense. We're able to bring modern identity solutions to clients quickly. And when we talk about emerging technologies, everybody gets a little concerned about the risk until you see how it solves your problem. And so with with being able to solve the problem with less friction, it really aligns to solving problems more than just in a test idea or some sort of innovative incubation and that allows us to deliver value faster.
But I will also say that it has been incredibly easy to work with Dcope. Their team is collaborative. They're responsive. They're eager to bring our two networks together and they're deeply invested in the mutual success and it makes our teams, it makes our expanded teams far more confident and it really shows up in the outcomes that we deliver to our clients. As Reishi said, a good channel partner is going to have that intimate relationship with the clients.
And so when we stand up and say we believe that Dcope can solve your problems and we bring them in and they do solve their problems, it becomes so much more than just selling software. It becomes this increased set of uh capabilities that we've delivered to impact so many things that you never even knew about and we are co-creating the future of identity. Beautifully put, Katherine. Reishi and I had the same thought. We're both impressed with what you just said.
Thank you so much. And Rishi, I want to build on that too because speaking of partnerships, we also should talk about Amazon Web Services. Dcope is an Amazon Web Services ISV partner. How does your relationship with AWS help you and your partners get an additional edge over the competition? I I think the the best way to put this uh is AWS or our cloud is powering all of the technology innovation, right? Right. I mean I I think we're talking AI but there is a layer of cloud which is powering all of this.
AWS being the leader in that space from my perspective. Every customer we go into that is building on top of AWS services requires an AWS expert requires somebody who can integrate the solution into AWS environment and a delivery vehicle. Right? So for us I would say and I will speak on Katherine's behalf here which is from my perspective AWS is that base layer channel partners such as trace 3 brings the expertise and then we are able to deliver our solution both from a marketplace or fulfillment perspective through AWS but also bring in the expertise on top of AWS work with AWS solution architects and sales teams to deliver the solution to the customer so that it fits in and deploys right on top of AWS.
So it's an amazing ecosystem and AWS has done an incredible job even simplifying the whole payment process if you ask me. We have been talked a lot about technology and customer value but simple things the whole payment process the customer can get a single bill from AWS doesn't need to worry about delivering different payments that's a huge value from a customer perspective our customers come to us and says well we absolutely value trace 3's expertise we value your software want to have a single bill on top of AWS can we do that and it's very seamless how this ecosystem has worked for our joint customers Well, Rishi, where can interested channel providers go to learn more about Dscope and how to partner with you?
Yeah, so best way is to go to our website. We are big on sharing our thoughts, sharing all of the material, trying to keep it ungated. We have a partner program and you can learn more about on our website, but also uh lot of videos, lot of tutorials, lot of content to learn about how uh CIM is changing the entire customer journey, is changing the AI landscape. So looking forward to more interest from this community. Absolutely. Well, Rishi, Katherine, thank you both so much for your time today.
I really enjoyed getting to learn about your partnership and your individual companies. And of course, thank you at home for joining us. If you'd like to see more episodes of PartnerP, you can check out channelinsider.com. Once again, I'm Katie Pavoso and I'll see you next time.
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