Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Nelson Cicchitto, CEO of Avatier (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: When you are in deals with 70,000 or 120,000 users, are you seeing Okta as a competitor or a partner that you integrate with?

Nelson Cicchitto: We don’t see Okta in those deals. If they are in the deal, then we can integrate with them. We haven’t set up our system to use Okta as the directory service, but nothing is preventing us if we wanted to do that. 

Sramana Mitra: In the deals you are going into, whom do you see as competitors?

Nelson Cicchitto: The deals we are in are more access governance. These are people that care about risk, security, and compliance. Okta doesn’t play in that area. Imagine Okta with access governance, risk associates, and the ability to go shopping for whatever you need. 

Sramana Mitra: Whom are we talking about?

Nelson Cicchitto: Xavient and Sale Point would be direct competitors with what we are doing rather than Okta. 

Sramana Mitra: Pull yourself up to a 30,000-foot level and look at the industry. Help us point to some white spaces where new entrepreneurs could find new problems to solve and build companies around. You can talk about anything in the general cyber security domain. 

Nelson Cicchitto: This is not in the cyber security domain, but we just filed for a patent in disrupting email and how email is read and received. There’re a lot of new capabilities that we are leveraging for the identity and access management space that bleed over to non-cyber security spaces.

In our space, there’s a white space in bringing everything together. Think of it as an identity trust bridge – to bridge everything together and to be agnostic to whose solution is being used. There is a lot of white space in sovereign identity where people have not gotten a lot of traction yet.

There hasn’t been that application that everyone settles on. These are the standards to push. Managing your own identity is not something I want to give to a lot of my employees or any person. There are challenges there and there are tons of white spaces in that area. 

Sramana Mitra: I have your point of view and we look forward to doing the story. Thank you for your time. 

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Nelson Cicchitto, CEO of Avatier
1 2 3 4