Vice President, Non-Human Identity & Agent Identity Security

IDC is seeking a Vice President, Non-Human Identity & Agent Identity Security to serve as a senior market-facing leader defining IDC's point of view on one of the fastest-moving, highest-consequence shifts in enterprise security. Non-human identities — service accounts, API keys, workload identities, and autonomous AI agents — already outnumber human identities by roughly 45 to 1 in the average enterprise, and by as much as 150 to 1 in cloud-native environments.

The market for governing them is projected to grow significantly over the next decade.

This role will define and lead IDC's research agenda spanning non-human identity governance, agentic identity and access management, machine credential lifecycle, and the vendor landscape racing to address it. The category is at an inflection point: vendor consolidation is already underway, with established security players acquiring specialized non-human identity and agent-security startups as early signals of where the market is heading.

Market coverage in this space is limited, and that gap is the opportunity: this role has a genuine window to establish IDC as the definitive voice in NHI before the category fully formalizes.

The Research Director/Vice President will engage regulary with senior vendor executives, enterprise buyers, investors, media, and industry stakeholders to assess market requirements, technology adoption patterns, investment priorities, and competitive dynamics, while helping build out IDC's tracker, Market Scape, and advisory offerings in this space.

• Lead IDC's research agenda for non-human identity (NHI) and agentic identity security, including machine credential lifecycle management, workload identity, service account governance, and AI agent authentication and authorization.
• Shape IDC's market taxonomy, research priorities, and point of view on how NHI is emerging as a distinct security buying category — separate from, but adjacent to, traditional identity and access management (IAM).
• Develop and publish differentiated research, including market sizing, vendor assessments (Market Scape), forecasts, buyer guidance, and executive-level advisory content.
• Conduct and oversee market sizing, forecasting, competitive analysis, and trend analysis across the NHI and agentic identity vendor landscape.
• Track vendor strategy, M&A, startup activity, funding trends, partnerships, and product innovation across the space — from PAM incumbents extending into NHI to venture-backed pure-plays.
• Engage senior technology vendor executives through briefings, inquiries, advisory calls, strategy sessions, and industry events.
• Engage enterprise security, identity, cloud, and AI leaders to understand adoption priorities, governance gaps, implementation patterns, and buying behavior.
• Represent IDC externally through presentations, webinars, conferences, media engagement, investor discussions, and executive client meetings.
• Partner with IDC analysts across security, cloud infrastructure, AI infrastructure, and identity to build integrated, cross-domain research perspectives.
• Support and help grow syndicated subscriptions, custom research, consulting opportunities, and strategic account engagement tied to IDC's expanding coverage of NHI and agentic identity security.

The role may include leadership across several of the following domains:

• Non-Human Identity Governance: Discovery, inventory, lifecycle management, and governance of service accounts, API keys, secrets, and workload identities.
• Agentic Identity & Access Management: Authentication, authorization, and privilege control for AI agents and autonomous systems, including dynamic runtime permission acquisition and sub-agent spawning.
• M…