Category creation often seems mysterious – until you see it in real-time. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Eric Olden, CEO of Strata Identity, pulled back the curtain on how he’s building the identity orchestration category, offering a rare glimpse into active category creation.
From Known to New: The Category Origin Story
Eric didn’t invent orchestration as a concept. Instead, he saw patterns in other successful technologies: “I didn’t invent orchestration, but there were companies and technologies like Kubernetes that broad orchestration as a concept. And things like Terraform Hashicorp have been orchestrating infrastructure for a long time. You had the Kubernetes world that was orchestrating compute.”
His insight was applying this pattern to identity: “What if were to orchestrate through automation and abstraction, identity management.”
Simple Positioning in a Complex Space
One of the most powerful aspects of Eric’s approach is his clear positioning: “To say it real simply with strata, we’re building vmware of identity management.” This analogy helps prospects understand the category by relating it to something familiar.
Meeting the Market Where It Is
Rather than pushing category terminology immediately, Eric’s team started with customer problems. “When we started 2019, no one was going into Google and searching for identity orchestration. What they were doing is they were searching for their problem,” he explains.
They focused on specific challenges: “How to manage two identity providers. We use Okta and we use Microsoft. How do we make them work together?”
The Research Foundation
Category creation requires deep market understanding. Strata spent “almost whole year just interviewing companies and say hey, what were your biggest problems.” This research became their “State of Multicloud” report, which helps validate the category need.
“The way it looks like in a report is, what are your top three concerns of security for a multi cloud? And maybe in 2023 it was a, B and C. And how does that compare to last year?” Eric explains.
2024: Evolving the Category
Their current strategy balances vision and practicality: “Market the vision and sell the product,” Eric shares. “We’ve really oriented our go to market message around a very concrete, tangible set of value propositions, solving very tactical things.”
This approach helps them “attach to a budget they have to solving that problem.”
Building the Moat
As the category gains traction, Strata is focusing on differentiation: “It’s really about building features and technology into our product that makes our approach architecturally very different than everything else that’s out there.”
Interestingly, their main competitor isn’t other software: “Modernization niche is super lucrative because the alternative is to do things by hand and that costs tens of millions of dollars.”
Measuring Category Success
The ROI proposition is clear: “Typically for every hundred applications that you secure with orchestration, you’re going to save anywhere from seven point five to fifteen million dollars.” But proving this required third-party validation through Forrester research.
Content as Category Foundation
Their content strategy evolved with the category: “The long play that I would recommend to every founder is to get your content search engine optimized.” Today, “when you do a search for identity orchestration, you’re going to find my company strata, at the top of the list. And we don’t pay Google for that.”
Analyst Relations Strategy
Understanding the importance of third-party validation, Eric prioritizes analyst relations: “If it’s not in the top five things that you’re doing from a marketing standpoint, it really should be, I would say top three.”
The Future Vision
Looking ahead, Eric sees the category expanding while the message focuses: “We’re really focusing and winnowing down the focus of what we’re doing, bringing to market the product expands, but our message contracts.”
For founders watching this category creation in action, several lessons emerge:
- Start with existing patterns people understand
- Position simply, even if the technology is complex
- Meet customers at their problem, not your solution
- Build authority through consistent content
- Focus the message as the product expands
Creating the identity orchestration category isn’t just about coining a term – it’s about systematically building market understanding, proving value, and solving real problems. As Eric’s experience shows, successful category creation requires patience, consistency, and a relentless focus on customer problems rather than technical terminology.