Evolveum's AI Solves IGA Onboarding as Market Shifts to Open Source

BRATISLAVA, Slovakia – April 01, 2026 – At the recent Gartner Identity & Access Management Summit in London, Evolveum, the company behind the open-source midPoint platform, addressed a persistent thorn in the side of enterprise IT: the slow, costly, and complex process of integrating business applications into Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) systems. The company's answer, a new AI-powered assistant named midPilot, arrives as the market undergoes a seismic shift, with organizations increasingly prioritizing digital sovereignty and turning away from restrictive proprietary software.

The Hidden Burden of IGA Integration

For years, the promise of IGA has been to centralize and automate the management of digital identities, thereby enhancing security and ensuring compliance. However, the reality of implementation has often been a long and arduous journey. The "hidden cost of slow application onboarding," a topic presented by Evolveum's Chief Product Officer Pavol Mederly at the summit, is a well-known but often underestimated drain on enterprise resources.

Industry analysis confirms that a significant portion of an IGA project's total cost of ownership (TCO) is not the initial license fee but the protracted and complex integration phase. For large organizations, the queue of applications waiting to be onboarded can stretch into the hundreds, with timelines extending for years, not months. This delay severely erodes the time-to-value of a critical security investment.

These hidden costs manifest in several ways. Firstly, the technical challenge of connecting a diverse portfolio of modern and legacy applications requires specialized, expensive developer talent. While modern apps may offer standardized interfaces, legacy systems often demand custom-built connectors, turning each integration into a time-consuming mini-project. Secondly, this slow pace forces many access management tasks to remain manual, leading to administrative overhead, inconsistent access decisions, and increased risk of human error. Finally, every application that remains outside the centralized IGA system is a potential security blind spot, contributing to a sprawling landscape of "shadow IT" that is difficult to monitor and secure. With identity-related breaches now accounting for the vast majority of cyberattacks, these blind spots represent an unacceptable risk.

AI as the Accelerator: Evolveum's midPilot Enters the Fray

Evolveum's midPilot is engineered to directly confront this challenge. Built into the company's flagship midPoint platform, the AI assistant is designed to automate the most labor-intensive aspects of application onboarding. By leveraging Generative AI and machine learning, midPilot can automatically generate connector code, recommend data mappings, and configure the complex logic required to link an application to the central identity system. Evolveum claims this can transform a process that once took weeks of manual effort into a task completed in days.

"The engagement at the event confirms that the market is exhausted by the complexity of application onboarding in IGA," said Pavol Mederly. "MidPilot demonstrates that identity security can be both scalable and rapid when you leverage the flexibility of open source."

The project's significance is underscored by its backing from the European Union's Next Generation EU program and Slovakia's Research and Innovation Authority (VAIA). This support is part of a broader European strategy to foster digital autonomy and reduce dependency on foreign technologies. By funding innovations like midPilot, the EU aims to strengthen its technological sovereignty and bolster the competitiveness of EU-owned companies in critical sectors like cybersecurity. This strategic alignment provides Evolveum with not just financial support, but a stamp of approval that resonates with organizations prioritizing European-made solutions.

The Rising Tide of Digital Sovereignty

The launch of midPilot is timely, coinciding with a profound market trend: a growing disillusionment with traditional, proprietary IGA vendors. Organizations across public and private sectors are increasingly vocal about their concerns regarding digital sovereignty—the ability to control their own digital destiny, including their data and infrastructure.

This movement is fueled by several factors. Vendor lock-in, where customers become so deeply embedded in a single provider's ecosystem that switching becomes prohibitively expensive and complex, is a primary concern. Furthermore, data residency requirements, such as those mandated by GDPR and other regional regulations, are forcing organizations to scrutinize where their critical identity data is stored and processed. Proprietary "black box" solutions, which offer little to no transparency into their underlying code, are falling out of favor as organizations demand the ability to audit and verify the security of their most critical infrastructure.

Open-source platforms like midPoint present a compelling alternative. Their transparent, auditable codebases offer a higher degree of security assurance. The absence of licensing fees reduces the initial financial barrier, and the inherent flexibility of the model allows organizations to customize the solution to their exact needs without being beholden to a vendor's product roadmap.

"We are seeing a fundamental change in how organizations evaluate identity security investments," Mederly noted. "Sovereignty over your identity infrastructure is no longer a nice-to-have; it is a strategic requirement."

Building the Future Through Community

Reinforcing its commitment to this open and collaborative philosophy, Evolveum has announced it will host the 2nd Annual MidPoint Community Meetup in Prague from May 12-15, 2026. The event is positioned as a hands-on, practical forum for identity professionals, developers, and the wider midPoint user base to share knowledge and best practices.

This community-centric approach is a core differentiator for Evolveum in a competitive market that includes heavyweight proprietary players like SailPoint, Microsoft, and IBM. While proprietary vendors rely on internal R&D, open-source projects like midPoint harness the collective intelligence of a global community of users and developers. This collaborative model can lead to faster innovation, more robust and secure code, and a product that is more responsive to the real-world needs of its users.

The upcoming meetup will feature sessions on IGA strategy, showcase real-world deployment case studies, and offer deep dives into the platform's latest developments, including the new midPilot assistant. It embodies the open-source ethos of shared learning and collective problem-solving.

As Mederly explained, the strategy is twofold. "While the Gartner Summit allowed us to share the 'why' of modern IGA, our community meetup is where we show the 'how'." This approach of pairing high-level strategic discourse with practical, community-driven implementation is how Evolveum aims to not only navigate but lead the ongoing evolution of the identity management landscape.