In July of this year, I made the decision to leave VMware and join a young and promising startup called Torii. As Steve The Identity Guy, I think my decision shocked a few people as most people felt if I were to go anywhere, it would have been to one the leading identity management vendors.
So Why Torii?
Torii presented a unique and intriguing opportunity – it was something so compelling that I was willing to step away from my comfort zone of Identity and Access Management. Although, if you understand Identity and Access Management, you know that Identity is core to everything so you’ll never fully leave the space. You will also see when I get to the workflows in Torii that there very much is a big identity component involved.
I’m going to break this blog into two components as this is how I made my decision, the People and the Product.
The People
I knew two people previously that had joined Torii – two people that I have worked with in the past and greatly respect their abilities and technical aptitude. They introduced me to their VP who has a resume full of successful startups and achievements. I researched the leadership team to understand the background of the founders. I spoke with the CEO, Uri Haramti to understand the vision and the values that Torii has built. It was blatantly obvious that they’ve not only built a solid product (and I’ll get to that shortly) but they were actively going out and hiring the best people to build out this organization.
You can have a company with a great product, but without great people that can execute on the vision – it will never succeed. With Torii, I saw a company with great people and a great product. They value employee experience – they focus on enriching the experience for the employees so that everyone is successful. This is key to not only employee retention but key to attracting top talent.
The Product
Torii is a SaaS Management Platform that gives you insights and visibility into the SaaS applications being used by your organization , visibility into the licenses and spend including the management of vendor contracts coming up for renewal.
Once you integrate your applications (IdP, HRMS, Expense etc), Torii will present you with a view of the applications that have been discovered from multiple sources including an optional browser extension that will capture business applications using your corporate email.
At first glance you might be wondering, isn’t this information already in my Azure, Okta or Workspace ONE?
The identity provider will tell you the applications that you *know* about and have configured to work with your IdP – Torii will tell you all that plus the applications you don’t know about and much more!
We all know that project manager that purchased a project management application or that customer success architect that picked up a mind mapping application and uploaded corporate data to that application.
Torii will connect with your Finance/Expense system to discover apps that employees have purchased on their own and submitted an expense report. This is extremely important especially if that employee leaves the organization. IT will need to know where corporate data exists in the SaaS world.
Once you’ve integrated your applications, you will want visibility into license optimization. Torii will provide you this information along with users that are inactive or have left the organization but still have licenses:
Seeing the information in Torii is great but what you really want to do layer on some automation.
As an Identity Guy, I’ve seen many different provisioning and de-provisioning solutions over the years but seeing how easy it is to create a workflow in Torii was just jaw dropping.
First you select a trigger:
Then you select an action:
It is really that simple – you can do things like creating accounts, removing accounts, removing a license, send an email, send an approval request and so much more.
In just a few minutes you can create an off-boarding workflow that
- Suspends the Google Accounts
- Transfers the Google Workspace Docs and Drive Data
- Creates an email alias to point to a manager
- Disables Google 2 Step Verification
- Sends out off-boarding tasks for all those fringe applications (that were discovered by Torii) that may not be integrated with your identity solution so those can be removed as well.
- and so much more
Everything is so easy to configure – this was obvious from my first demo with the company.
Torii gives you visibility through the full life cycle of both users and applications. When a new application is discovered or license is not utilized you can trigger multiple actions.
In the Torii SaaS management platform, the possibilities are endless. There is so much in the platform around SaaS Application Management, Expense Management, Contract Management, License Management and Workflows.
In October, our Torii team met up in New York City – It was an incredible opportunity to meet everyone including the founders in a face to face setting for the first time. In our meetings, our Chief Product Officer provided us with a road map and product direction strategy for the next year. I think in my 20+ years of enterprise experience, this was the first time I’ve ever seen a standing ovation for a product road map. Its an exciting time at Torii and there are some really big things in store for this company.
………………This is why I joined Torii!
If you are interested in knowing more about Torii:
Steve The Identity Guy 