SecureAuth Nabs Longtime SailPoint Exec Paul Trulove As CEO

‘We’re looking to identify some areas for expansion both in the investments we’re making in our partners … [and] looking at potentially new partnerships that will help expand the business as we go forward,’ new SecureAuth CEO Trulove tells CRN.

SecureAuth has brought on former SailPoint Chief Product Officer Paul Trulove as CEO to strengthen the company’s presence in passwordless authentication among large enterprises.

The Irvine, Calif.-based identity and access management firm has tasked Trulove with bringing dynamic authentication that remains active all the way through the user’s session to the entire SecureAuth customer base. Trulove most recently spent 14 years at SailPoint, culminating in a three-year stint as chief product officer. He started Jan. 24 and replaced Chairman Ravi Khatod, who had been interim CEO since July.

“This market still needs a product visionary in every company given how fast the market is evolving,” Trulove told CRN. “I think having a CEO step in that has that product background is a real strength and is a real commitment by the team that owns SecureAuth that it wants to participate in the innovation side of the market.”

[Related: SecureAuth Buys Passwordless Authentication Vendor Acceptto]

SecureAuth competes with traditional identity and access management vendors such as Okta as well as newer passwordless authentication companies like Transmit Security and Hypr and set itself apart from peers through its adaptive authentication framework and experience supporting large enterprises. The company focuses on customers with at least 10,000 users who have legacy infrastructure they still need to manage.

“The needs of a midmarket enterprise and a large enterprise are vastly different as it relates to identity,” Trulove said. I think the heritage of the core SecureAuth team in a lot of the complexities that it’s been able to solve in the enterprise market … is really going to set us up for a lot of success over the next several years.”

SecureAuth excels at delivering across a complex set of requirements stemming either from the size or scale of the customer’s business or the presence of cloud, on-premises and SaaS environments, Trulove said. The company for a period of time explored moving down into the mid-enterprise but now realizes that simpler or more general-purpose offerings like Microsoft’s can work for less complex organizations.

Large enterprises often have edge use cases that require an extension of core functionality and expect that third-party applications like SecureAuth’s will be configured to meet the unique needs of their environment, Trulove said. In contrast, customers at the mid-enterprise level or below will typically tailor their implementation to the way the product works out of the box and require less customization.

Trulove plans to focus in the first 100 days on getting the password authentication capabilities obtained from Acceptto in December packaged and launched as part of SecureAuth’s core IP. Many SecureAuth customers are interested in the future state of passwordless authentication, and Trulove said he wants to fully leverage Acceptto’s technology to drive that going forward.

Trulove also wants to improve the channel’s delivery capabilities in areas such as installing and configuring applications, wiring into enterprise applications, and building out policies and rule sets to run things like adaptive authentication. SecureAuth plans to boost its training resources and professional services to support partners doing delivery as well as bring in new partners who can deliver to large enterprises.

“A partner-centric strategy in the enterprise is critical to the success of the business,” Trulove said. “We’re looking to identify some areas for expansion both in the investments we’re making in our partners … [and] looking at potentially new partnerships that will help expand the business as we go forward.”

From a metrics standpoint, Trulove would like to see SecureAuth’s annual recurring revenue (ARR) growth accelerate over time by delivering new capabilities to existing customers and acquiring new customers in the large enterprise space. The company has nearly 200 employees today, and Trulove anticipates growing headc ount at a similar pace to revenue expansion over the next several years.

“The future in my opinion looks really bright,” Trulove said. “There’s a number of opportunities I think this business can go attack, and we’re looking forward to doing that in concert with a very strong partner network.”