From a Federated IT Service Provider to Secure CIAM: How ACP Optimized Identity Management with SSO [Advanced]

So, welcome everybody. It's short before lunchtime, so thanks for being here. I explain something totally different to the eBay guys. They have a lot of number of users. They have a lot of spread identities over the whole world. We are in a B2B sector. For those who don't know the company, ACP is an IT provider. We are in Austria, Germany and Switzerland. And we have, of course, a lot reduced numbers of users. But what we have is this one guy buying the contract for 10 millions. This is the more important stuff and this is our talent.

And the second thing is we are spread all over Germany and Austria with a lot of subsidiaries. We are talking about 50 plus offices and also 50 plus legal entities.

So, when we are growing, we are growing and getting a new subsidiary. So, they bring their own IT stack. They bring their own identity stack. They bring all the stuff.

So, we have to integrate them. Let's talk about a little bit. Okay. Should be next. About the size, we are about more than 30 years old, the company. It's roughly about 50 locations. It's usually three to five more locations each year.

So, we are growing. We are hunting in Germany and Switzerland. In Austria, it's a little bit different. And we have customers from small, not very small, small companies.

So, 20, 50 workplaces up to all the Bundesamt für Einkauf in Germany or something like this or some banks. So, it's a nice surrounding, but very complex. The second thing is the spreading. It's from last year.

So, there are some points more. And of course, all the challenges of internal IT staff of these ERP systems. Every new subsidiary brings their own IT stack and they want to integrate. Because in the end, as a customer, probably of you, you want to have one experience. It's one ACP. It's one company you are talking about. You think of this, but in the end, it's spread around.

So, we should have a good idea and think and drinking many beers in the night to have a good idea how to solve this problem. And the second thing is what, for me, it's difficult to explain this in English. And in Austria, we say this, the Viennese style, the charm offensive.

So, we go for, we are the more nice than the challenges around us. So, it should be something that all these services we do. And sometimes, we do more than the people are paying.

So, customers are liking us. And in the end, all this feeling should come to the customers.

Yeah, but the challenge is we have a lot of applications and a lot of services. And the most of them is websites. We have landing pages. We have marketplaces. We have multiple marketplaces because we have one for licensing. We have something for hardware. The newest is the device-as-a-service or mobile-as-a-service.

Here, we got the most challenge I will explain later. We have service now for the service ticketing and the change management tools to the customer facing.

Of course, CAM should be connected. Why not?

And also, we call it here custom solutions. Every subsidiary has still, oh, we have our old CMDB. We have to integrate. We have our event app somewhere.

So, there's popping up a lot of applications. In the end, this should be one identity, one experience, one design.

So, it's a large list of challenges. One back to the mobile-as-a-service. Mobile-as-a-services, since the mobiles are so expensive, they're more finance. They're more as a service. And this challenge was for us because here we have the end user.

So, the users of all the phones of all the companies we are servicing. And the challenge is this is not five, this is not ten users of the company.

Usually, it's the purchase order, the IT staff guys and this. Now, we have all down to the other people. And these are more likely to the B2C market. But in the end, we have the Parlamentsklub of Austria or something like this. From the services, we want to show to all the customers is all we do in each size, in each variety to the customer to experience as one customer portal. We're still working on it, but we are in a good way. We started on the left side very, very long ago with these duplicate invoices. Where is where I purchased this?

You know, when you want to reset your mobile, you need the invoice. But you're in a B2B market, where is this invoice? You need this to reset the phone.

So, we have a portal. You can search for the serial number and you will find this. Service cases, I think, is also service reporting. We do something like a bank account.

So, you can put some money and then all the professional services are booked around. And in the end, now the more challenging stuff is we have an API layer underneath. And on top of this, now an MCP server layer. Because people are now using more and more in their AI system. And they can ask their prompt engine and say, where is this serial number? Where I bought this? And then they are asking for all the suppliers and searching the data. The challenges we had is a long list, I think. The thing now we are working on is the onboarding process.

Because what we are doing is, we also repair all these professional notebooks. We do Dell, Lenovo, Apple, HP.

And this, sometimes you bought it from MCP, most of the time not. But in the end, you should gain more access to your service. Because in the end, it's a business contract repairing an Apple iPhone. You can send it over to us. We repair it and you get it back.

And this, underneath, you should get an identity or not. You want this service. You want the ticket. You want an email.

So, it's always a big discussion how far we go and how much we are asking you. But in the end, it's never marketing. It's never newsletters, stuff like this. It's just safety, security to get your custom contract data. Single sign-on. One big challenge.

Please, please do federation. We don't want passwords. We don't want passkeys. All this stuff in the B2B. Please bring your own identity. It's a big thing. Many of the customers are not allowing this. And I can't understand. Does anybody know what a federation is? Bring your own identity and you want to use it?

Okay, good. Thank you. Muchas gracias. Because this is really... The thing is, we have no idea if you are still employed in the Deutsche Bank or BMW or somewhere. We don't know it. And this is the challenge of supplier in the B2B market. Bring your own identity.

Hopefully, this is governed by the HR department. And when you go, your account is disabled there some minutes or hours when you leave. And at the same time, you don't access our portal anymore.

So, in the end, all the requirements we did around... To kind of speed up.

The UI, we are still challenging. One of the challenges is how we name this button because we have a long time of integration. What we did is all these applications, we were in the beginning fetching up all the identities and making one big pot, all the identities together. The big thing is, we have a long time of parallel. Where the old identity should work, the new one. And the biggest discussion we had, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, is the culture part. How we name this button that the customer knows.

Okay, this is the way I should go now. This is the new way.

So, the UX, UI part was really the biggest discussion. Because, I'll show you later the pictures. But this is the thing. The tool selection was also, we had a discussion with Kuping and Cole. Very nice guys. They know what to do. And we had a long list of selection what to do. I will show you. And in the end, we are the customer first and not the login. But in the end, the security, of course, is the login. What we also got is a long feature list. And the selection was the CDAS platform. So what we were not expecting and not really asking, but we got it for free, is the content management.

So now the whole onboarding process is working in one platform. And we get from the smallest identities, just the email address, usually press the button to the Microsoft, Google or whatever you bring. We have a lot of shibboleth accounts from the education, universities, public sector. And now we have this all in one platform. And in the end, we got the portal with all the sizes. And what we see here on the left, this is this Google style search button. It will get in some months a camera that you can open also your camera thing. Then you can go here and make a picture.

What the hell is this device? And you can make a picture of this, the backside with the part number and the serial number. And from this starting point, we say, oh, this you bought from SAP. We know what you want to do. You want to buy a new one. You want to have a cable. You want to have a ticket or something like this. So this is the AI part starting up. This is the login page. And we had this long discussion about what federation buttons we are starting up here. Because usually you ask first the email address and then you start. But most of the people are pushing the first button.

Because in Austria, we have really a lot of Microsoft customers. In Germany, half-half. But in the end, all the features are working. And the federation starts with the email address. And then is the routing to all the public customers and the education stuff.

For us, it was new to make a self-registration. Because usually, we go to the salespeople. The salespeople are, oh, you want to have an account. It's something very new. I give it because we know you.

Now, this is self-registration. And the account just get informed as a customer ABC. They register. They have access. Please contact him. We have also now a centralized profile page.

Yes, the screenshot I did in Redmond. So the location is the right one. But we will to redesign it. Because we had a big discussion about the background picture. The Germans in the north, they want more big ships or some industry things. The Austrians, we have more of these nice. This was the biggest discussion. But this is marketing style. The portal looks like this for now. If you then remove it, you have all the things. I think this is the boring stuff. But from the features here, we have also this Guthabenkonto. We have all the tickets open. I think this is very easy.

And on the right side, always this personal connection. Who is my key account manager? Who is my inside sales?

Now, we have also, who is my service delivery manager? Because things are changing. And this is always up to date. We have also integrated our marketplaces.

This, we are still working on it for the next year. Also to integrate all the licensing shop. We have AppDirect. We have the hardware shops, more than one. And then we have this routing, who you are, which shop we are showing you. This is this routing to everything. And what I explained before, we have an API layer to the customer. And the automation stuff. And we're also to the partners. Because you ask us, is this warranty from HP storage, blah, blah, blah. And then we ask back all the suppliers. So together, SIDAS was the solution. We are still happy with that.

All the challenges we had are solved. It's a really nice solution. It's a German thing. This was a topic, but not really a must. We were discussing with Microsoft a long time about intra-external customers. But they're by far not that possible what the SIDAS is doing. I'm MVP.

I really, I know the guys from intra, really nice guys. No, don't touch it. Sorry. And we do a lot of API. The thing I explained was integrating all the e-commerce stuff. But the second thing is now doing this, I would say, the MCP layer. The last years you were telling about the API layer. Now it's the MCP layer. Because I think the next two years, the customers I'm asking more for, where's the invoice? Where's my ticket? Where's my information?

X, Y, Z. This is all. And of course, because it was part of the project, we have also to integrate the chat. So in German you say, wo ist meine geilste Rechnung? Who's my best invoice? He is just thinking of where I bought the, show me the stock of the serial number BOL9M64. And then it shows up. And you have, if you have the right, if you have the role, if you have all this security stack to see the invoice. So we have all these use cases. If you can see the invoice, last two days we had a sales meeting.

There's a big discussion of who in the customer's company is allowed to purchase, to book, to see the offer, to see the contract. This role management is now the longest list we are challenging. What we did is, I think here you see it on the left, down here, you can see benutzerverwaltung, so the user management. We give the customer, and the customer please should do this, because they know each other, all the colleagues, and say, okay, you see the company, you see the tickets, you see the invoices. This is very important. From the framework, we did it by ourselves.

We have two subsidiaries, one in Frankfurt and one in Linz, in Austria, do all the programming stuff. We started from the journey with coping a call. We had an analytics part, what we do. And the solution was the SIDAS from Germany. The AmiConsult is the partner who were helping us getting in. And the SAP staff is what we do. And in the holding, in the headquarter, we are a team of three, four people. So it's fine for all the 3,000.

And what the amazing stuff, what we have to always to say again, it's for free, because we are now gaining so many features that people are asking, can I have it, but how much is it? I said, no, this is just part of the service. What we do, if you are interacting with us, all the services. Licensing is part. Now all the license contracts is a big challenge. The e-commerce stuff, all the warranty stuff and this. So thank you. That's it. Hope you had some questions. And that's to the lunchtime. Thank you. Thank you. We have one question and that's perfect from a timing perspective.

This was more at the beginning of the presentation. What was the biggest measurable user experience improvement after introducing the new gate? The amount of tickets discussing about, can I have access? Because we had so many platforms and the customers were asking, can I have access to the web shop? And they say, oh, I got a ticket. And the next support case was, oh, I don't have access here. I don't have access here. Can you give me this? This was really the biggest chance for us. And now we have one identity. You press the button and you're in. Perfect. That's the way it should work. Yeah.

Thank you very much. Thank you.