Lean IGA? Why not just Lovely IGA?
Why our first analyst report proves Identity deserves a Renaissance
We have some news to share. IAMONES has made it into its first analyst report, the KuppingerCole Leadership Compass: Lean IGA (Identity Governance and Administration), alongside vendors that have been on the market for 10+ years. We've been around for a little over two.
However, what matters most is what the report says about the market. In our view, it confirms something we've been saying for a while:
Identity deserves a renaissance, and Large Language Models are the only ingredient that can foundationally deliver it.
Let me elaborate on this.
We call it IGA, but we're talking about a new type of platform.
The label is still IGA, because it's the one everybody understands. But the newer solutions are platforms built to fix the original sins of today's gorillas: monoliths written the old way; millions of lines of code, complex UIs and projects that take months to configure it.
Lean doesn't mean "fewer features"
This is the most common misunderstanding, so let's be clear about it. At IAMONES, "lean" means "simpler" as the platform is configured in natural language, with the full spectrum of IGA capabilities. Simpler because you no longer need to bring in expensive product specialists and wait months before anything works.
And lovely, because User Experience is a Security issue.
Business users are pulled into critical decisions: access approvals and reviews. And they can't make sense of any of it. But why? Because they are “lost in translation” with an endless list of cryptic roles and permission they don’t understand. And when people don't understand, they either say ‘ok to everything or simply request way more than they need. Governance becomes a compliance ritual.
IGA isn’t a “done and dusted” market after all
Gartner retired its IGA Magic Quadrant after the 2018 edition. The market was seen as mature, dominated by a handful of big players. A recent Gartner Innovation Insight has a telling title: “IVIP and IAM Augmentation Vendors Are Disrupting Light IGA”. Two analysts, one conclusion: this market is anything but done.
IVIP (Identity Visibility and Intelligence Platforms) exists for a simple reason. Identities and access rights are scattered across silos, without a full picture. And the picture keeps getting bigger: alongside human identities there are now agent identities, and they need governing too.
But visibility is not what clients ask for. Automated Remediation is. A dashboard full of RED is just a more expensive way to worry. That's why IAMONES has had write-back capabilities from the start, and that’s how we also ended up in the KC Lean IGA report.
But beware: "lean" doesn't mean "AI-native".
Reading the report, it's clear that few "Lean" vendors are truly AI-native. Just look at when they were founded. KC covers 21 vendors: 17 rated in the Compass and 4 "Vendors to Watch". Only three were born in the LLM era: IAMONES and Iden (2024) and Corma (2023). The other eighteen were founded in 2022 or earlier, some as far back as the 1990s.
Why does it matter? Because a product born before 2022 can't be AI-native: LLMs didn't exist yet. Adding AI on top of a pre-LLM product is just “lipstick on a pig”: it doesn’t fundamentally change the TCO equation.
Time for an #IdentityRenaissance and more #IAMore.
For those who know me, you know my passion for funny titles and acronyms. As an Italian, I’m biased toward words from my Bel Paese. As the company operates between Bologna and Florence, I think you understand where I took the Renaissance term. There’s a second funny hashtag though, that reflects what’s going on in the identity market: #thatsIAMore.
Andrea Rossi
References
[1] N. Deshpande, Leadership Compass: Lean Identity Governance and Administration, KuppingerCole Analysts, 20 October 2026. https://www.kuppingercole.com/research/lc81072/lean-identity-governance-and-administration
[2] B. Guthrie, R. Archambault, Innovation Insight: IVIP and IAM Augmentation Vendors Are Disrupting Light IGA, Gartner, 11 September 2026, ID G00847027.