By Shane Butler, Executive Vice President of Identity
I've spent the better part of twenty years advising the CISOs and CIOs who carry the risk when access goes wrong. So I'm not going to rehash a problem to the very people who live it. You know the story…you could probably tell it better than I can. Every generation of PIAM over the past two decades has taken its run at solving it, with genuine effort and uneven results. None of that is news to anyone reading this.
What is news: something significant is now in motion, and SwiftConnect’s acquisition of HID SAFE is the opening move.
A 2026 problem, running on a 2005 mindset
We don't need to go down that rabbit hole again here. If you're a practitioner, chances are you've lived the story of a platform sold as configurable that turned out to be a heavily coded build behind a low-code veneer. The result? Every change became a statement of work and nobody wanted to touch the scaffolding. If you haven't lived it: congratulations, you dodged that bullet. And the better news, for everyone, is that something entirely different is coming.
Governance is no longer where the race is won. It's the qualifying lap, the minimum required to be taken seriously. Clearing that bar and stopping is why this space stood still for two decades while the rest of enterprise identity moved on.
I don't yet know what we'll call what comes next.
The labels this industry uses were built for a different moment, when a platform was something you bought once and rolled out over a year. That made sense years ago.
Today, what I care about is simpler than an industry term or category, especially since practitioners don't think in acronyms. They think of the people at the door: an employee, a contractor, a visitor or a vendor whose badge should work in one building and nowhere else. Where we're headed is the ability to access exactly what you need, exactly when you need it, and to have it feel effortless while being fully auditable. That's the shift I joined to help build.
Not another feature. A different starting point.
I didn't join SwiftConnect to ship the next incremental release on yesterday's architecture. I joined because this team is doing something structurally different: making physical access a first-class citizen of the modern identity stack, governed and orchestrated the way you already run everything else. Natively, not bolted on or bridged.
Layer genuine intelligence onto that, the kind that acts on the identity and workflow data you already hold, before a ticket is ever raised. You will notice that something fundamental shifts: you stop managing access and you start eliminating the work of managing it.
That isn't a feature. That's a new category. And we're building it with some of the sharpest minds this industry has assembled for exactly this purpose.
The why comes first. The buzzwords can wait.
Will we bring AI, agents, machine learning, all of it? Yes. Of course. But I'm not going to flood this post with the vocabulary every vendor deck in the industry is currently drowning in. Simon Sinek said it best: "People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it." As a practitioner, that's where I'll always start, and it's where I'd urge you to start too.
So here's the why: The mistake this space made over twenty years was building for the handful of administrators behind the console instead of the millions of employees, contractors, visitors, and others that the system actually serves.
Trust and security? That's the given. What's been missing is the experience and services mindset on top of it. Why can't physical access be elegant? Intuitive? Natural? It can be. It should be. It will be. That's what's in the works.
Zero trust, and everything you'd expect alongside it — you've got it, it's all coming. But experience comes first. In the solutions we build, and just as deliberately, in the people who serve you.
The how? Trust me. There is a world of genius under the hood working on exactly that, with all of the technology you'd expect and some you wouldn't. That story will be told, piece by piece, in the months ahead. But the why comes first. It always should.
Access at the speed of presence
Everything we're building comes back to one outcome: access so organic and so frictionless that it moves at the speed of your presence. You arrive, and the building already knows. No badge fumble, no queue at security, no ticket sitting in someone's tray. The system has done its thinking before you've had to do any of yours.
That is the outcome we are holding ourselves to. And what's visible today is a fraction of what's under the hood. This business is going to shake up the entire industry, and we are only getting started.
A connected world, built on trusted access
Think about the last time you tapped your card at a payment terminal. You didn't wonder whether it would work. You didn't think about the network behind it, the trust framework underneath it, the decades of infrastructure that made a two-second gesture possible in nearly every shop on earth. You just tapped, and it worked.
That is the end game for physical access. An experience so organic and natural that you never give it a second thought, anywhere in the world, in any building, for anyone. The SwiftConnect connected access network is the ecosystem that makes it possible. It is the trusted, global fabric linking the systems, credentials, and identities that physical access depends on, so that frictionless access stops being a premium feature of a handful of flagship buildings and becomes simply how the world works.
That's the vision. A trusted global ecosystem, built around an access experience that works everywhere, for everyone.
Watch this space.