SailPoint CEO: ‘Leading Partners’ Will Be Crucial For Agentic Security Push

The identity security vendor is working closely with partners such as Accenture and Optiv to assist customers with the massive security challenges posed by the adoption of AI agents, SailPoint CEO Mark McClain told analysts Wednesday.

SailPoint is working closely with channel partners to assist customers with overcoming the massive identity security challenges posed by the adoption of AI agents, SailPoint founder and CEO Mark McClain said Wednesday.

While responding to an analyst question during the identity security vendor’s quarterly call, McClain mentioned several key partners for SailPoint in the agentic push. Those include Accenture and Optiv, No. 1 and No. 28, respectively, on CRN’s Solution Provider 500 for 2025, as well as Deloitte and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

“We are expecting to move in the direction of supporting customers’ needs around agentic with all of those leading partners,” McClain said during the call with analysts Wednesday.

McClain made the comments as SailPoint—which returned for a second time as a public company in February with an initial public offering that saw major investor demand—released results for the first time since the IPO. Revenue for the Austin, Texas-based vendor’s first fiscal quarter ended April 30 rose 23 percent year over year to reach $230 million, above the Wall Street consensus estimate of $225.2 million.

SailPoint’s stock price was up 16 percent as of this writing Wednesday morning, to $22.78 a share.

With the widespread industry interest in adopting agentic applications, experts have highlighted the massive potential security risks involved with poorly configured AI agents. In particular, risks around identity, access and permissions are seen as paramount.

SailPoint’s own recent survey found 80 percent of respondents reporting that AI agents had taken actions that were not intended, such as accessing an unauthorized system or sharing sensitive data.

‘Incredibly Well-Positioned'

In an interview with CRN at RSAC 2025 in late April, McClain said that SailPoint’s pedigree makes the company uniquely positioned within the identity security sector to truly address some “really hard problems in the world of agentic.”

“I'm not sure anybody’s better positioned than us to address some of these problems,” he said.

In large part, this is because agents will need to be allotted specific levels of controlled access to certain systems or data—and SailPoint is best able to understand how to control that, McClain said.

Identity vendors that focus on single sign-on and multifactor authentication simply don’t have the depth of understanding required to do granular control of agents, he said, whereas privileged access vendors lack the breadth with their focus on a limited set of areas to protect.

“When we talk about being well-positioned, we say, look, ‘We've been doing breadth and depth [in identity] for 20 years,” McClain told CRN. “We have to understand an incredibly wide array of [factors] in these large-scale enterprises—and we have to go deep in all of those things to do what we do, to control what you can actually do inside that application.”

The bottom line with securing agentic is that “SailPoint just happens to be incredibly well-positioned because we’ve done that for 20 years,” he said. “I think some of these folks are going to run into some pretty big challenges as they try to figure out what does it take to [do this].”

MSP, Midmarket Opportunities

McClain’s comments about its focus on partners Wednesday also follows the launch in March of a major expansion of SailPoint’s MSP program.

While traditionally focused on serving the enterprise, “this midmarket space has been uncovered by SailPoint,” SailPoint Channel Chief Dave Schwartz said in an interview with CRN at the time.

The expansion of the vendor’s MSP program, which includes providing packaged offerings that can be more quickly delivered to customers, is a “great way for us to go after” the midmarket, he said.

SailPoint’s new bundled offerings and special pricing for MSPs and their midmarket customers are aimed at enabling faster deployment, according to Schwartz.