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My notes quickly. Good morning, everybody. I hope you have had a great experience on this year's EIC. As I had here. There's a great Bunche of technology out there, and a lot of great windows with great things. What I want to talk here about is pretty much looking at it from a customer perspective.
We, as alar, we are a chemical company. We are not in this we business. And actually you will see a couple of topics in this presentation, which we already discussed last year on the EIC. But I especially want to talk about how some of those vendors or especially one of these vendors has helped us to overcome the challenges for our business. So let's quickly talk about who is clar. So we are not an it company. We are a leading company in special chemicals. We are based in moderns. We are about 17,400 employees. Worldwide.
43 percentage of our employees are in the emerging markets means we have a big focus in China, and then there's still the markets here in Europe, but we also present in oil mining services in north America. So last year's figures, just as a, as a background, Looking at our pillars, the main drivers for it strategies, we focus pretty much on R and D, which has a direct connect to our it services, which we need to provide. We listed in the Dow Jones sustainability index, because we are care about our environment.
And then the third really driving factor, which we do and which we have done a lot of work in the last couple of years, we do active portfolio repositioning. That means we do mergers and acquisitions as a constant scene. The rest of the, the pillars. I think everybody is working in it's about growth. It's about profitability, about efficiency. So here I want to ask quite provocative questions to you. We are here on digital. We are doing identities. We are talking about innovation, but think about yourself. Is it this new theme? Is it for you more on a personal level?
There is to heaven or a highway to hell. And I want to put this into context. Think about from a business perspective, is it giving you more opportunities or is it be a disruptive innovation for your business? Thinking about that the top 10 companies dealing in these it security market or are listed on the stock exchange, either owned by Americas or by Chinese companies.
There, there is where your data goes to second. Think about yourself, your private life, Google possibly knows more about you than you remember yourself, or like them to remember yourself and did church Orwell's 1984 become true. Or are we already beyond looking forward to your answer to that question, how you personally respond to it? So Clarion, we have two main topics which are driving us. That's R and D innovation. And the second is portfolio management, which means constantly merger and acquisitions. We've done a lot of those in the past years.
And what we've learned out of it is pretty much, we need to get better on it. We need to be quicker, faster, better quality. And exactly this has shifted the it strategy from a traditional on-premise environment to say, we are now gonna go leveraging cloud much more than we did in the previous years. And this has a couple of consequences to our environment.
First of all, you can read this slide and pass this missing because it didn't have the space there, but you can read this, this slide from left to right also a little bit upon how much control do you need and how much innovation you can do for clarity and cloud strategies. Pretty much is about getting a much more agile innovation life cycle, doing some of the stuff better, trying stuff out without the lead times, which we have received in the past. The same story applies for if we do divestitures, because that's also part of our active portfolio management.
It means we want to avoid those remnant costs, which we have seen when we have done spinoffs in the past. So if you're talking about going to cloud, then literally identity comes into the center of all, because that's exactly how we want to have our users controlled how we want to stay in control the cyber security. That's the battle we need to win. So putting this all together in the past is we have can of our books. So clarity and the traditional chemical company, we a traditional it model. So we have done a very, very great job on having the, the things in control.
When in our on premise environment, we have built our VPNs. We have had secure access. We have done a little bit of mobility in the past, but more from a security perspective than for the end user satisfaction. We have our identity management, pretty much process control. Chemical is all about process. Process is something which we are good at having an existing process, doing more efficiency.
We are very good at that one, but we are not very good on doing something fast because whereas our investments, our investments are pretty much in plants where we produce those have a lifetime from 20 to 30 years. So what did we do when we, when our management or it strategy was saying, we now need to be more agile. We need to shift into cloud.
We say, what are we gonna do to put the user in the center in longhand, but applying the right security. On the other hand, we listed down a couple of our re requirements because this is, we wanted to leverage what we already have, the good on-premise environment, but extending into a cloud presence. So we are running active directory as our single directory of truths in four domains, regionally diverse. And we have planned for full office 365 cloud strategy. This has where it started off. So part we've gone of do the provisioning stuff.
How do we enable BMD the new workforce coming along with the new digital natives, which are fed up about doing multifactoral authentication, VPNs, having stuff, not ready when they need it. So the things which we required pretty much was we wanna keep our level active directory. One of the first things which we found out that we need to change is about the separation about mobility management and identity. It was key for us when we are looking on the market, what we are gonna do next is to say, Hey, mobility and identity needs to be married because your device is always with you.
And so it could act us as one of the security measures as a secure factor of our zero authentication, risk based authentication. So we wanted, and context based authentication is something which we focused in addition is to say, it's depends the same user, but different applications may have different schemes of authentication or availability based on the device you are using, which means pretty much sitting on a hotel lobby. PC has a different thing than sitting on your company's laptop, mobile or other device.
And as we do merger and acquisitions all the time, some bigger scale, some less scaled one, we wanted to see support for multiple ID forests and integration in an easy way, merchant acquisitions. There's a couple also divestitures have a couple of critical stuff. And one of the critical stuff is have day one access provided to an acquired company for a couple of critical systems. So with this set of requirements, we went down and said, is it sense, or to extend what we have on premise Or do we do an absolutely new wave, at least for CLA?
And we got convinced pretty much that identity management from the cloud should be not delivered on premise. So we were looking out for an identity as a service solution, which can do quite intensive provisioning to many different apps, which we are using ride out of the box and provide single sign onto our end users and have an included mobile device management capability. So next steps were pretty simple. It's like we are doing all our projects, you're gonna go and scan the market and see which of this vendors.
And one of this is outside here in presenting, or couple of them outside presenting their products there and saying who does fits best. And for Clarance the identity as a service decision worked out quite well. What we have chosen here for Clarion was ther five platform for a couple of reasons. It has one of the most outstanding, active directory, connections and integrations. It delivers out of the box, our mobile requirements, and it could serve our context based requirement for login.
In addition, we could also make one of the key other key requirements happening quite easily, but for VPN less access to our on premise apps, as long as their browser based, What would, what did we get out of it? So the pros, the roadmap for, from when the decision was taken to implement and more cloud services was to the implementation and completion of our mail migration was about 12 months for all this 17,000 identities you have seen.
So the decision after the decision of we are going, I D I S and starting the first workshop up to implementation to get ready to deploy office 365 have been about two and a half months. And you need to understand for Clarion, it was quite difficult because our internal active directory domain and how they are set up and how they are distributed per default are not compliant to what Microsoft would ask us to do.
First, we using non rotatable domains. We having based on this integrations, a couple of challenges to solve, but with this product and the ability to rewrite stuff on an application base and deal with ID attributes has allowed us to meet those requirements. And we will on a successful, complete our mail migration in the next three months. So what's your answer. Stay with two heaven still. There's one third saying hard to hell. That's quite interesting.
So my take on, on it's equally, it's equally, there's no right or wrong, and it's not, as I said, not about the song you like most, hopefully there's a lot of new opportunities in those technologies. We see nowadays what you need to understand pretty much there as well is it will require to shift your business model for chemical company like Clarion. It means from where we concentrating today, delivering just products, we will need to shift, oh, it's changed again. We will need to shift Our environment to services as well.
We will need to think about business models, where we say the data which we gain and the robots, which we can, how can we more efficient help our customers using our products to solve, to solve their problems. Thank you very much questions. Thank you. Anta you saw that people after you showed the slide actually were answering more. Yeah. So the trend was kind of getting a little more balanced, So yeah. And I think this is where it's right. So two questions that we've got. So first one is an interesting one because of the scope.
I think so I think there was SIS and for example, So yes, we have shifted SAP P already to ha and we are talking about how cloud our HR systems are going to success factors, which we integrate quickly as well. In my direct belief is there will, for the next couple of years, there will be still this balanced about control and innovation. And we will have some property area apps as well as we use in the chemical industry. So some of the stuff stay on-prem, but yes, we are moving enterprise apps into the cloud. Good.
Next, are you on your way to heaven or highway to hell? None of both. I would say personally from a personal life, some of these technologies of scary, I would say for business life gives us tons of opportunities. Okay. Good answer. Thank you very much again.