Thycotic named leader in new KuppingerCole Leadership Compass

by Chris Smith on May 8, 2020

Why innovation has become so important to Privileged Access Management

As noted in the 2020 KuppingerCole Leadership Compass, Privileged Access Management (PAM) is one of the fastest growing areas of cyber security today. Forty PAM vendors now compete for annual revenues that will total $2.2 billion this year and will more than double to $5.4 billion by 2025.

Analyst Paul Fisher, author of the Leadership Compass report, points out that this phenomenal growth comes from the convergence of several trends. These include digital transformation and a shift to the cloud, rising cybercrime, new compliance regulations, and the primacy of DevOps in accelerating the application development process.

Thycotic gained significant ground “thanks to good product enhancements in the last year.”

Thycotic has surpassed several competitors in this latest Leadership Compass to earn the number two position in overall PAM leadership. Based on three categories of evaluation: product, innovation, and market leadership, Fisher explained that Thycotic gained significant ground in this year’s matrix “thanks to good product enhancements in the last year.”

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PAM table stakes have risen to a whole new level

Along with the growing number of PAM vendors, Fisher notes that the definition of a comprehensive PAM solution has evolved as well. Capabilities, such as credential vaulting, password rotation, controlled elevation and delegation of privileges, session management and activity monitoring, have become “standard features,” in a PAM solution. To stay competitive, PAM products today must deliver more advanced functionality, Fisher says, including privileged user analytics, risk-based session monitoring, advanced threat protection and the ability to “embrace PAM scenarios in an enterprise governance program.”

Consequently, Fisher defines nine required capabilities in the report that incorporate privilege account data lifecycle management, application to application PAM, endpoint privilege management, session recording and monitoring, privileged user behavior analytics and more.

Kuppingercole Leadership Compass: Advanced PAM Elements — Figure 2 from report: Advanced PAM elements. As the market demands have developed vendors have added more functionality to their solutions.

Fisher also highlights other advanced features that should be integrated into a comprehensive PAM suite, including PAM for DevOps and remote access to privileged accounts to help secure access for remote workers and for third parties, such as contractors and vendors.

The good news? Thycotic’s full suite of privileged access management products and services cover all these capabilities for both on premise and cloud infrastructures. But it is not just the comprehensiveness of Thycotic’s PAM solutions that contributed to its strong showing in the Leadership Compass in 2020. Rather, it comes from Thycotic’s unmatched commitment to improve our solutions through continuous innovation.

Setting a new standard for PAM innovation

KuppingerCole defines innovation this way:

“Innovation is, from our perspective, a key capability in all IT market segments. Customers require innovation to meet evolving and even emerging business requirements. Innovation is not about delivering a constant flow of new releases. Rather, innovative companies take a customer-oriented upgrade approach, delivering customer-requested cutting-edge features, while maintaining compatibility with previous versions.”

Kuppingercole Leadership Compass: Innovation Leader — Figure 3 from report: Product Leaders in the PAM market segment

This is where Thycotic stands out in the 2020 KuppingerCole Leadership Compass report. Among innovation leaders, Thycotic is rated highest on the Innovation (Y) vertical axis.

Kuppingercole Leadership Compass: Technology Leader — Figure 8 from report: The Product/Innovation Matrix. Vendors below the line are more innovative, vendors above the line are, compared to the current Product Leadership positioning, less innovative.

In KuppingerCole’s product/innovation matrix, Thycotic is top rated along the innovation (X) horizontal axis.

From the innovation standpoint, Thycotic has launched new cloud and on-premise versions of Privilege Manager that deliver endpoint protection through application control, new versions of Secret Server on premise and cloud, Account Lifecycle Manager our service account governance solution, DevOps Secrets Vault and Connection Manager, all within the past year. In every case, these product innovations were primarily based on customer requests and feedback that guide our product planning and development process.

Where do we go from here?

Like most analyst reports, the KuppingerCole Leadership Compass does not make recommendations among vendors. However, the report notes that Thycotic earned “strong positive” ratings for security, functionality, and interoperability overall. Delivering new integrations for Secret Server and DevOps Secrets Vault, for example, Thycotic supports connections to key DevOps and robotic process automation (RPA) tools.

Fisher specifically called out Secret Server as “known for its comprehensiveness, ease of deployment and configuration that can reduce product development and upgrade cycles substantially.” And, acknowledging that Thycotic has benefited from its sales partnership with IBM, Fisher also pointed out that Thycotic “has remained very much its own company and able to reach big corporate customers on its own.”

We will continue to develop and improve our products in the spirit of the report‘s definition of innovation leadership: those vendors who are driving innovation in the market segment, and providing several of the most innovative and upcoming features we hope to see in this market.