The European Identity Conference is the meeting point of all identity practitioners not only from Europe, as the name suggests but also from other continents, most notably from North America. It offers a unique opportunity to network with those people and get a grasp on the latest trends and shifts.
Before the event actually started, as the tradition states from previous times, we met for an IdentiBeer. As most of you know, we organize the local IdentiBeer in Bulgaria but this dimension was something different. More than 100 professionals from many countries and my personal highlight – Matthias Bauer was there! Matthias is an absolute legend in the identity security space – cofounded Völcker Informatik, the company that started One Identity Manager (and its predecessors) in 1994! 1994, I was still a kid in elementary school, having no idea what my later job field would be, barely had seen a computer and Matthias was already developing provisioning engines! Just wow!
The next day, the conference started. The bad thing about such a conference – you have so many parallel sessions that you already lost 70-80 percent of the content. Add all those meetings with prospects that you have and the number goes even higher. That applied also for the preconference workshops happening, so I had to choose one, “Eat the frog” (or “chew the frog”) is a popular productivity method that means identifying your most challenging, important task and completing it first thing in the morning. Not sure if this has been the idea of KuppingerCole Analysts when they were shaping the program for European Identity conference 2026 but surely a workshop about Non-Human Identities and AI was a grasping beginning.
Next was the opening keynote of Martin Kuppinger. What struck me a bit were the trends at the EIC 2019. They were Identity Fabrics, Decentralized Identity and… AI! Well things haven’t changed that much, have they. Of course, the Identity Fabric gets increasingly complicated, adding more security aspects to answer the threats of the modern world so that we even need Cybersecurity and AI Security Fabric. But still the concepts are the same.
Speaking about AI, a funny and at the same time giving food for thought was the presentation of Larry Chinski from One Identity, showing that according to AI you can use gasoline to make a spicy spaghetti dish. Chatbots give always plausible answers, but are they always correct? Yammie or not is still our decision and how powerful AI is depends on the “human in the loop”.
In general, when we talk about Identity Security, we must think about the organizations we are implementing it. These organizations are complex and complex organizations need complex IAM target architecture, especially if you are navigating through a conglomerate of entities, based in different countries and following different regulations. IAM is between ISPM and ITDR . It is not enough to deliver only IGA anymore – which is relatively static. But we must react in real time to security threats and strengthen our posture beforehand.
What I am really looking forward to is always the top 10 trends, shown at the closing keynote. No surprise- AI identity, NHI aka workforce identity management are important. But what shouldn’t be forgotten is that the success of your IAM project is that matters the most. It should always be supported with the “bird eye view “ and long term strategy in terms of Identity fabric and division of management functional and technology topics.
But what matters the most at such conferences are the people. Great exchanges with the strategists from our main partners – Heiko Klarl from Nexis and Rob Byrne from One Identity and of course with all others customers, partners and identity practitioners.
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