 Everybody welcome back to the sales community exact event, the cube after dark, I'm here with my good friend, Tom LaHive, who runs partner enablement at cyber arc. Tom, good to see you. Dave, great to see you back. Thanks for making some time. You guys just coming off your big conference. I got to start. What's it like out there? What are the customer conversations like? It's actually pretty interesting right now. So last week, 50 years old customer conversations and I'm seeing themes. And theme number one here is at cyber arc and we're not unlike any other security company out here is the attack vector that all of our customers are getting exposed to is widening. Historically, it's been the attack vectors in humans. I'm going to go after the human identity, the person, right? But now it will be internet of things, web based applications, while cloud based systems, the attack vector went from humans to non human identities. So as I talked to customers over the last week, they're all like, Hey, I love cyber arc. I'm using your PAM, your PAM offering. You know, to secure all my human identities. Tell me what you can do for my non human identities. And those could be endpoint devices, operating systems, applications, web apps, internet of things, OT devices, you name it out there, right? So that's sort of like a large market that needs a lot of help. Tell us about the event. Where was it? You know, what was the profile? How big was it? It was a customer event. You know, there was, you know, there was hundreds and I couldn't get the details, but let's just say hundreds of customers at it. Right now we're in the middle of something called IWT. You would know about impact event in Boston. Now we're taking that to the streets. So we have an IWT or impact world tour event throughout major cities throughout the whole world. So this is an example of one of them. Did you have like every event, you know, what we do in the cube, every event we go to, there's an AI theme. What was, were there a lot of questions about AI? Did you have an AI sort of pitch that you're offering or roadmap? What was that discussion like? Yeah, yeah. Gen AI, Gen AI is like, it's the talk of town. It is, it's both a offense and a defense strategy, right? How is Cyber Rock utilizing Gen AI today and tomorrow in order to make a more secure environment? To counter obviously all the exposures that the bad apples are doing out there, utilizing AI to increase level of attack. So it's like, we get one, they get one. We get one, they get one, but AI is going to be embedded across our entire portfolio, you know, soon. Do you think that AI will benefit attackers more or defenders? It's great. Who knows, Dave? I mean, you know. You used to be an analyst, Tom. Yeah, those days, you know, now operate on, you know, on business facts, that sort of thing. And you know, where it's going, I honestly, I do not know. Let me throw a premise out. I would say near term, it's probably more advantageous for the attackers because they can write better phishing emails. Yeah, well. But eventually you get the tech in the hands of the good guys and they'll be able to counter. And then, you know, like you said, it's a cat and mouse game. But everything maybe gets compressed. Do you buy that premise? Yeah, so think what the utilization of AI right now, whatever AI tool it may be. It's not as like, you know, downloaded from anywhere and implemented into my solution no matter what that solution may be, right? That requires a level intellect and knowledge of how to utilize gen AI and AI. And it's true, it is most capable fashion, right? So those that have the most AI expertise right now win. Cyber Rocks fortunate. We have a large team of engineers that are highly skilled in this whole thing. So for now, I would say, you know, the defenders solutions here at the Cyber Security guys definitely have a leg up. Are there going to be smart hackers out there that have similar capabilities? Yeah, right? Possibly, but once again though, it's a Mad Hockey game. So from a partner standpoint, how do you spend your time? What makes an ideal partner? You know, part of your job is to create sort of, you know, the power of many is greater than the capabilities of one. Who are the, you know, your big partners? Where are you getting leverage? How do you approach, you know, building that partner ecosystem? So first off, we are our portfolio, everyone knows Cyber Rock as Pam, but our identity security portfolio actually goes after five different areas, like cloud security, endpoint management, DevOps, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Okay? So when we look at partners, we want to see which partners can be aligned each via each of these five different capabilities across our identity security portfolio. That's number one. Secondly here is when we're looking for an ideal partner, we want to talk about, is there a one plus one equals something more than just to us to combine solution together across each of those things. And that one plus one, the variables that go into it could be the technology and also like the soft side of the whole thing, how easy are they to do business with? How easy are they to help co-develop these integrations? How about supported integration? Okay, once that integration is completed and supported available to marketplace, is that partner willing to work with us on a joint go-to-market strategy? So we have 235 technology partners and we've now ranked down to approximately 10, 10 organizations that are all in on CyberArch. Examples are AWS, Red Hat, SailPoint, Tenable, Spheres, an upcoming relatively smaller company, Palo Alto Networks, up and coming relationship, Central One, up and coming relationship, and there's a couple others that we'll be announcing over the next month or so. That's great. What are you seeing out there? So as we entered 2023, it looked like Cyber was going to be somewhat immune from the macro headwinds and then that changed a little bit, sort of the springtime, things got a little, and then we've seen a lot of good potential, sort of exiting the summer, things were pretty strong and Cyber's held up pretty well. You're seeing AI spending go up but the overall top line spending's not growing. We follow this stuff pretty closely. So it's almost like they're stealing from one bucket to pay for some of the AI. Seems like Cyber's holding up pretty well. What are you seeing in the space? Yeah, I mean, I can't talk about quarterly trends, right? We're obviously in a quiet place, but just generally speaking here is like, you know, whether you say it's a problem with world politics, world dynamics, geopolitical, nation states, you know, of course, you know, Cyber is going to be one of those things that's going to be a constant for the better, for good and for bad, right? Our mantra here is we want to secure the entire, all identities for the entire world. Okay, that's what CyberArk wants to do. We want to secure every identity from cyber theft. All right, so, you know, that's a big market. And right now we've talked about, you know, it's securing like very large organizations here, but wouldn't be great if that capability goes across many markets, right? So that's sort of where CyberArk is going overall and every single market look out there is going to require more intelligent cyber security controls in order to protect themselves. When CyberArk wins, why does it win? And where do you feel like customers are asking you to do a better job? Our winning thing is that we start with Pam. We want to secure those human identities, okay? And we are one of the market creators of that segment. We've been doing this now since early 2000s. So that's our foundation offering, okay? And then from that foundation offering, the beauty here is I mentioned, we have four other segments that are connected to securing that privileged access management, that human identity, right? Like I mentioned, endpoint security, tie-ins to ServiceNow is an example. We have cloud security, tie-ins to AWS. And I can go on and on and on and on. So that's the unique part of CyberArk. Here's we start with Pam, and then customers realize the full breadth of our capabilities to secure non-human identities and more human identities across their entire IT environment, whether it be on-prem, cloud-based, hybrid environment, as well as integrated into like their key IT tools. I mentioned ServiceNow as an example. Explain why Pam, privileged access management is so important in the context of, I mean, that's the way if you can get the keys to the kingdom and you started there, explain why that's so critical to organizations. You know, you got to start with, you know, making sure that the right people have security, the right people have the access to the right systems for the right amount of time, all right? And therefore, if there was an attack to happen, you limit that, you know, you limit that, that sprawl, right? And that's what we do really, really well. So, you know, it is a necessary item. It has a compliance requirement associated with it. It is a budget line item and every single CISOs account here. And, you know, we invented that marketplace. Is zero trust a buzzword or is it becoming real? Real. Okay, how do you help? Do organizations struggle with operationalizing zero trust and can cyber arc help them? Yeah, I mean, zero trust means many things to many different people, particularly as the human identity becomes morphed much more easily now with AI tools, as you mentioned inside there. So, you know, cyber arc, we have a series of solutions on securing that human identity to, you know, minimize the exposure and, I don't know, move on from there. All right, Tom, hey, thanks very much, man. Really appreciate your time. And thanks for coming back into the game. Thanks for having me. By the way, Dave, you know, I've first worked for you in 19, should we say the year? 90, ready? Was it? Four. 94. So, right now at 23, so now we're, we are, yeah, it's almost- So, Tom and I worked at IDC together and we crushed it. We have like a 30 year friendship business reunion coming up soon, right? We really did quite some damage in the marketplace, right? I mean, that was kind of the ascendancy of IDC's turnaround. They're early, early 90s and then grew and then, cause I let you left and when, when did you leave? I left in 97 and I was at a management meeting today in offsite and they're talking about hyper focus, customer centricity, right? And the ability to like to realize those market opportunities and pivot and execute. And we were bringing up examples of companies that we were analyzing in the 1990s and very specific things they did. The professor's bringing that up in front of the whole management team. So, what we were experiencing in 1990s, right? Continue to rebirth itself in the early 2000s and the 2010s and even to today. So, we were, those were epic times that we experienced. Well, always the same wine, new bottle, but of course it's a new tech stack. All right, Tom, we got to go. All right, thank you for watching this episode of the sales community event here. theCUBE after dark, keep right there. We'll be back for more coverage right after this break.