Transform Your Customer Experience: Customer Identity Today and Tomorrow

My name is Joshua Cru from Okta and together with Edwin, who will tell something about a customer use case that they deployed with Okta, because we think that's the best way to experience the product and yeah. What you can actually do with it. But before we give microphone to admin, I'm going to quickly talk about what Okta is and where we are coming from. So we are an American based company founded in 2009 when to McKinnon and Fred rest, both active at Salesforce, thought about identity and access management, and really saw a huge opportunity to do something in the cloud with this. And that's when, when they started the company and it really took off 2017, we went IPO and the customers, the, the customer base, but also the company is growing at a very fast pace. We serve more than 4 million users today on a daily basis.
And that varies from both very large enterprises to very small customers, because the identity and access management problem is something that every company has. And when you think about identity and access management, and today we're focused on the consumer identity, of course, it's relevant that you integrate with everything. So we no longer speak about application integrations, but also with integrations like VPNs, for example, or a SIM solution, because you need to correlate all the information and finally Gartner position just as a leader for the fifth time recently. So what is the Okta identity cloud it's born and built in the cloud, and that's a completely different story than when you have an active directory and you put that on Amazon, that doesn't make it a cloud solution. It needs to scale. And when we started to develop Okta from the first line of code, it was built for the cloud, but we also want to connect everything.
It's our mission to enable people to use any technology and connect them with each other. But we also think it's very important to be independent and neutral because companies like Microsoft have solutions for this, but they integrate very well with Microsoft stuff. They don't want to integrate that well with, with Salesforce or with box. And that's why we think when our customers tell us about integrations, we need to integrate with everything, whether you use Microsoft or whether you use something else, it needs to be obviously secure. And there's a whole lot of noise about whether the cloud is secure or not, but we have a lot of certifications and it's crucial that you can trust. As we just heard from Christian, what's going on with your data. And we have built a very reliable and secure platform and it needs to be always on as a cloud solution.
If, if we are not available, then nobody can access their applications. Nobody can authenticate to the Inco platform to check their energy bills. So for us, when we were building this in the cloud, we also thought about how are we going to do upgrades and how do we maintain this solution? And we do around 48 updates per year. That's almost once a month, a month, once a week. So that's incredibly often. And yeah, you can only do that. If you have a scalable solution. When we look at the Okta identity cloud, it's built out of five components, single sign on universal directory and universal directory is the main topic that Edwin will cover today. It's basically our yeah, active directory in the cloud for user and group objects. Lifecycle management is all about provisioning users to other applications. And that can be also relevant for consumer I identity systems where you need to provision users to let's say a third party database, for example, adaptive MFA.
We know that MFA is important, but you don't want to enforce it every single time. If that user is coming from a known device, something that you trust or you see that is coming from his home location for the 10 time, maybe then you don't want to enforce MFA for example, with SMS or something else. And our last product is API access management, which basically allows us to integrate with backend APIs. Single sign owner is all about users, authenticating to applications. API access management is all about how that user authenticates on behalf of the application to backend API.
So that's applicable for the internal side as we call it, it products to modernize it in the enterprise, but also for API products. And that's the use case that Awin will talk about today. When we talk about transforming the customer experience and the old traditional stack, that's no longer sufficient. In the old days, you used to use everything from Oracle, everything from IBM or everything from Microsoft, but with the change of the landscape, you now have much more infrastructure applications, platforms, APIs, devices, and it's no longer integrate for just your employees or just your consumers, but partner, suppliers or contractors. Everybody needs to have access to all the various solutions that you can see on top. So you need to have a neutral and independent platform to support those use cases already consume more than five minutes, I think, but admin Postma was a lead architect. Enterprise architect at Inco will tell us more about how they deployed Okta at Indico. Thank you, admin,
25 years ago, I installed my first solar panels and I still love to be part in, in that. So that's why I work for a NACO. And I just tell you want to explain you something about the shift we have met through, because you might wonder why would utility install something like a cm? Why would we have a speech today? I still remember that one of the directors of Okta, he told me he lost his identity and he had to prove his identity by the utility bill. So if your utility bill can be approved of your identity, what's the problem anyway, for a utility company. So I first, let me explain something about how we see a digital utility and in the old days, it used to be so that you, you, you Don not bother about what's behind, behind the wall and you just plug in and you, you consume electricity and that's it and old world behind it doesn't bother you.
And in, in that world, it used to be, so there were some central big power stations, power plants, and they provide energy to anyone. And nobody has to think about it. And then in the new world, where we move to watch to new way, then you will see that you will not only consume energy, but money of us will also produce energy. And it will be important that we can share this energy. And so the utility becomes something more that enables you to be a prosumer production and consumption on the same spot. So that's what we see. We see a digital in a, in the market where we can share energy between your neighbors and you, when you have shortages or when you need something or that you can produce something for your neighbor, you need, we need to make the grids more end to end to many to many.
We need to make sure that we can virtualize all these energy resources. So we can steer that the grid is still up and running with all these new production facilities. And of course also our customer needs to be digital because he will be much more engaged by production and consumption of energy than ours. So that's what we see and what we try to achieve. And our ambition is to provide sustainable energy in a decentralized way for anybody. So this is a, NACO a NACO is a, an, I would say an incumbent and energy company in the Holland. And we have some customers and we started moving in this direction and here has some figures. And we have now I think 400,000 customers using IOT devices connected to the internet and helping them to save energy and helping them to become more participant in the new energy world.
So for example, for a utility that normally earns money by providing you energy, we have to shift to a company that helps you to save money, energy, or produce energy. And by that we earn money. So we have to move our traditional business model to a new business model. And this is how we try to do that. And by providing you a new services that save your energy. For example, here, you see our new device. We have now sold, I think 400,000 of them. That's a smart thermostat. That's connected to your ch boiler. And because we provide you all energy insight and how you can save energy and give you advice. And with small smart algorithms to keep your house warm, you save on average 6% energy a year. So that's another, that's a type of service we offer. Now, this is another one we are now in piloting phase.
To be honest, it seems like a heater, but actually it's a computer. And we install a server in customer's house. And the heat of the custom of the server will provide the heat of your house. But the surface is also used to, to sell cloud services to other customers. So it's a distributed cloud service to our customers. So we try to combine, instead of having one central cloud data center, where all the heat has to be cooled. Now the heat will be used in your house to use energy. So these are two examples of how you would see it. And this also shows that this type of new innovations are helping us to help you use energy in a different way and produce energy your own. So why do we implement Okta for then our customers? Well, it used to be so that our interaction with the customers, we have 2 million customers, but they only think about, is, say six minutes a year.
That's when the energy energy bill comes. So our customer interaction and the intimacy was actually not so high. So, and also when the bill comes, it's not really a happy moment, probably. Yeah, you have to pay, right. So, but now, because we have these new services, our customers almost daily visits our, our services because they want to, for example, change the temperature of the house, or we offer them other services. And for example, they want to interact or make their house more self consuming or whatever. So the interaction is now much higher than it used to be. They, we have daily contact with them, for fire, our apps and so on. So you see this change in behavior also means that we have to change the way they interact with us. So I still remember that when our marketing director was sitting next to me and asked him, do you use your own website for self-service?
And he said, no, I always forgot my password. I said, because I use it once a year. Okay. So maybe we have to solve that then instead of having a nicer, nicer website instead. So, because this interaction is more, we, we set a client of vision and I think two things are important. It should be very easy to use our services because, and it also should be more omnichannel because we have this thermostat, we have bots, we have apps and all these stuff, and all these ways of interacting and it should be more seamless. So that's what we call omnichannel. It's not only many channels, but it's the experiences across all channels seamless. So that's what we established with one digital identity for all channels during the whole customer life cycle. That's important for, for us. So we worked out whether this mean for us. And we came up with such a type of requirements and the whole entire day it was about these topics. So I can skip them, I guess, but these are the type of requirements that were important also for marketing and also for the, the designers of our channels. And we also also about omnichannel and agility maybe.
Well, in the end, I think it's important that all this identity management is part of your customer journey in the end. I think that's the most important. All these things add to that, that is working more seamless and natural. So we started implementing this with Okta. We first, we used to have an home brew solution, but we thought we couldn't continue using that. And then we implemented it. And I think most of our requirements were just met in the box. So that was easy for us, but we started implementing and then our marketing department said, well, you can implement it, but we are aware the customers should not be aware of it. So we had to do something with the password migration and so, so that we, we felt it, but they will took a long time before all customers were transformed from the one system to the other.
I think the next time I would do it much, much quicker. And maybe another way to be honest, we started also implementing social login of a login. And then we noticed that a lot of customers were not really using that. So we still have to learn what, what is working for the customers for sometimes customers. This is the way. And so it will be much more a personalized experience in the end. And also I think we start now making the connection to our APIs and the API gateway, and I think that's working quite fine, but also there, you must, yeah. Find your way through how, how strict you are and how you will do it. So I think we are still in a learning process, but we are now all our customers are in the system and we migrated them and I think it's a nice step forward. Oh, so now we move on, we implemented a lot of things and then we move on and think step by step, we can add all our parts to it. And this is our roadmap. And of course we have also our wish list at what's Okta. So they can provide us with other services. The more customers they have, the more likely they have money for our wishes. So maybe, and this is the way we try to proceed.
And this is my last slide already to make it not too long. Any questions? So far to the lady or to me? Yeah.
Anybody, any questions
Then I gave it back to
Yeah.