Executive Interview: Phil Montgomery, CMO of Identiv Group

Phil Montgomery is Chief Marketing Officer for Identiv, responsible for articulating and driving vision through marketing, product management and training. He has more than 20 years’ experience as a senior marketing executive in the security, virtualization, networking and mobility markets, working with technology from software to appliances to embedded security, at both large companies and startups. Montgomery joined Identive in September 2013 from VMware/EMC, where he ran product management for the rapidly growing virtual desktop infrastructure business. After successfully selling a directory enhancement software company he founded to Novell in 1999, Montgomery joined Citrix Systems to drive their security products, and has also held senior product management and marketing roles at Blue Coat Systems and Mocana. Droid Report recently interviewed Phil about his current role as CMO.

Phil Montgomery

Droid Report: Hello Phil, could you tell us more about your role as CMO of Identiv and your initiatives for 2014?

Phil Montgomery: I’m very interested in the strategic shifts happening today and addressing how Identiv can leverage and embrace them in order to deliver more value to our great customers. I’m equally excited to have joined Identiv at this time of disruption in the marketplace – physical and information (logical) access are converging and combining with industry-wide trends like mobility and cloud-based services. Identiv’s initiatives are to ensure that we deliver the most reliable and secure access systems, but also to leverage these industry trends to deliver more benefits and an improved return on investment.

The best example that comes to mind is Identiv’s cloud-based identity-as-a-service solution, idOnDemand, that allows customers to securely provision users from the cloud. Why set up and manage onsite software, computers and printers when it can be done securely at a fraction of the cost? What’s more, the credentials that Identiv produces can be used for premises as well as information access – simple, secure and effective.

Droid Report: Could you share some insight on the company’s recent two launches of the access control products at the Interop?

Phil Montgomery: Identiv is launching its new brand for converged physical and information access – the uTrust TS Readers product family. At ISC West, customers will see a complete converged system working together, starting with issuing a secure credential from Identiv’s cloud-based identity service, idOnDemand. Identiv is literally using our production service on the show floor to demonstrate how easy it is to provision a user and print a credential that can then be used for converged physical and information access – because, like bread and butter, physical and information access are meant to be together.

In terms of physical access, Identiv will be launching the uTrust TS Reader line – a revolutionary new reader that supports all major credentials in a single reader format, while offering strong identity verification, scalable migration and interoperability based upon secure open standards. The uTrust TS Reader is the first reader that will take customers from wherever they are to wherever they want to migrate in a single reader design, delivering the foundation for a single identity across the entire enterprise, from door to data.

Droid Report: How do you see organizations further evolving in the future with access control?

Phil Montgomery: The biggest trend in access control is convergence of physical and information access. Customers want one single system that allows them to configure and manage users one time, granting access to all resources, whether physical or virtual. The other benefit, of course, is that customers deal with fewer companies, security is improved and everyone sees a much better return on investment.

The real analogy here is what happened with office telephones. Businesses used to run separate cables, have a separate system, separate teams, and so on. Now, they just run VoIP phones off of the network and no one would think of  the phones as separate to IT. The same thing is happening in the physical access market – structured cabling, PKI at the door and IT integration is a reality today.

I personally prefer mobile-based credentials, but the reality is that most of Identiv’s customers are more comfortable with printed credentials as a visual way to confirm identity. For the foreseeable future, Identiv will continue to support card-based credentials while offering early adopters mobile- and cloud-based credentials.

Droid Report: What are some of the possibilities of how to integrate access controls of mobile devices with other physical and logical IT security plans are available to the organization?

Phil Montgomery: This is a great question, as the industry is really entering an era where customers want to grant access not to individual devices, but to the information being accessed. Most users now have a plethora of devices – laptops, desktops, tablets, and mobile phones, including BYOD. Granting access to each and every device would be a nightmare, but Identiv can effectively control access to that connected information.

Droid Report: Is there anything else you feel Android users and the Android market should know?

Phil Montgomery: I’m a big Android fan and have owned every Nexus phone since its launch. I love my Nexus 5. While we’ve been discussing physical and information access today, Identiv is also focusing attention in a different – yet completely connected – direction: NFC credentials. Identiv ships hundreds of millions of NFC credentials each year, ensuring the same level of trust that Identiv delivers for buildings and information to everyday items. But more on that another time.

Identive provides secure identification (Secure ID) solutions that allow people to gain access to the buildings, networks, information, systems and services they need – while ensuring that the physical facilities and digital assets of the organizations they interact with are protected. Based in Orange County, California, we are a technology-driven company with significant experience in diverse markets, and are uniquely equipped to address the needs of our customers worldwide in an evolving technological landscape.

We would like to thank Phil Montgomery for taking the time for this discussion and Identiv.