Fueling Digital Innovation with Customer Identities

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, or good morning, wherever you are. Welcome to this webinar. Fueling digital innovation with customer identities, how to manage customers' identities and access at scale for better user experiences. This webinar is supported by giga the speakers today. My name is Maria ARD. I'm senior Analyst with Ko Cole, and I will be presenting the first part of the webinar. And the second part, sir, Richard Darren will join us. He's senior director of technology and product strategy with giga before we start some housekeeping. And of course, some general information about keeping a coal as an Analyst company, a coal is providing enterprise it research. We are providing advisory services and decision support and networking for it. Professionals. We do this through our research services, where we provide several types of documents, including our leadership compass documents, comparing market segments, advisory notes, looking at various topics, vendor reports, executive views, et cetera.
We do this through our advisory services where we provide advisory to end user organization and vendors. And we do this through our events like webinars like this one, like seminars, and of course through conferences and our main event is the EIC, the European identity and cloud conference. The next EIC is just a few weeks away and it will be in Munich from the 10th to the 13th of May. And of course we think it will be a must attempt event, again, with a large number of speakers and sessions in the areas of identity and access management, governance, risk management, and compliance, as well as cloud security and giga will there be, will be there as well. And for already the 10th time cooking a coal will bring together exhibitors and more than 600 participants. This will include most of Europe's and the world's leading vendors and users thought leaders, visionaries, and analysts, and you should be there as well.
We really recommend having a look at the agenda, which is already online. Apart from that, we are already preparing the digital finance world in Frankfurt. This will be an event covering strategies for the developments and changes happening in financial services currently ranging from FinTech to big data and to new business models between mobile decentralization and the blockchain. And please consider having a look at our websites for all upcoming events, using the given URL, the guidelines for this webinar, you are muted centrally, so you don't have to take care of this. We are recording this webinar with the recording of the slide X going online on our website tomorrow, and there will be a Q and a session at the end of the webinar, but you can enter your questions during the presentations at any time using the questions panel on the right sides of the, of the go to webinar software.
Please do so please do so, so that we can start the Q and a session right away with a good set of your questions either regarding my part or the giga part regarding the real life scenarios, the agenda consists of three parts. The first part will be my Analyst view and introduction into customer identity and access management and its requirements. Then Ryder will take over and he will focus on understanding the challenges, benefits, and best practices of real life, customer identity and access management use case scenarios. And the third part will be the Q and a session as already mentioned. And that's, that's it already for the, for the introduction. And let's start with my first part. And as I said, we are talking about digital innovation. So let's have a look, a short look at what innovation in the age of digital transformation actually means.
We have a challenge and that means we are moving into a market of services and digital services and digital goods. So we are on the one hand extending traditional product offerings and service offerings into the digital space. And we are creating new products and new services. And we do this at an internet scale, not at an enterprise scale. So we are talking about millions and more users' identities within a system. We have new types of identities and we are no longer, not longer, no longer looking at at the enterprise and the employee and the partners. We are looking at customers. We are looking at subscribers of, of services. We are looking at prospective customers and everything that can be described as a community. So the role of identity and access management is, is shifting. So we are no longer looking at managing identities as a cost center, as traditional organizations do that.
We are moving identity and access management right in into the core of the business processes. So understanding identities is key for the business processes. Short look into the history, Mr. Kuppinger, who is the founder of this company actually said in 2007, that the CRM, the customer relationship management don't see their system in the context of IAM, even while it is the biggest identity store in most companies. And that was actually a new thought way back then in 2007. And I've picked a more or less random quote from, from the, from the newspapers. This is from revenge Shahar, from forbes.com. And he actually said in the digital economy, our personal information is the new money to pay for services, which is a complete extreme point on the other side, compared to what Martin said some, some nine years ago, and then actually both was and is true. And the new money is part of what is part, what is the digital transformation in the digital economy as of today?
So when we look at the identity and access management, we are looking at scaling the system in both purpose and scope. The traditional IAM was focused on the enterprise. So it was about managing employees and partners, making sure that we understand their full identity life cycle and give them the right access at the right time and only the right access to make sure that audit and compliance are happy. This has changed when we moved identity as a service into the cloud, where we have still enterprise scope plus the extended enterprise partners, supply chain, and, and, and we still have onboarding and life cycle processes, and we still have secure authentication. And we still want to make sure that the right people also partner supply chain have access to the right protected resources at the right time and still make audit and compliance, happy with customer with the C entering in the, in the name of the, of the product.
We have actually quite a change we are from, from one moment to the other. We are at an internet scope with C meaning customer. We have other processes which are a bit different onboarding now means registration means the first purchase means the subscription process, but we still need many of the processes that we do know from traditional IAM, which is secure, authentication, access to the right protected resources, still audit and compliance in another way, but still audit. And we now want to make sure that we serve the customer, the subscriber appropriately and adequately. And on the other hand, of course, for the business, we are actually providing services and goods. We want to make sure that we gain insight as completely as possible into the information that can be used for, for business decision making processes, a short overview, actually about what items of information we are looking at when we are talking about identities.
So we have people of course, at the core, but people are also related to organizations, which the provider of services might be. One people are using and owning smartphones, which might not be the same fact that they own, or they use it. And they use mobile devices in general, including smart watches and all this kind of stuff. Of course, this could be something that is not owned by them, but used by them. We have the upcoming connected vehicles. We have wearables, we have lots of different of things that are connected and related to people. We have to understand that all these devices, organizations represent actually one identity. And we have to understand this identity across all these relationships. And of course, all these systems also communicate with each other. So understanding this rather complex and increasingly complex relationship is one of the major challenges that customer identity and access management systems are facing.
And I think will have a look at that already later on to put it the other way around to have the person in the, in the center. One entity, one person had actually is represented through different identities or persona. For example, you do have a credit card. You will have a, a state issues ID card or passport. You have a relationship of course, with your employer. And this is an idea that they provide for you. You might have a frequent flyer card from your airline or an account at your bank. And of course, you know, what's, what's the next that I'm showing here is of course, this large set of persona that we carry throughout the, throughout the internet, which reflects different aspects of our personality of our person. And again, when people use these identities for authenticating and authorization towards services, we have to make sure that we understand that this Twitter account is this person with this ID card and this bank account.
So in general, we are talking about redefining customer relationship management. So we have actually a, a large set of goals, which are here are five listed in, in, in general, we have new ways to deal with customers. We have no longer, only brick and mortar shops. We have online ways to deal with customers, which is actually our foundation for business, this relationship towards our customers. And as a next step, it is also the foundation for business decisions. How will we continue providing services and goods in two years from now, the information is provided for many customers. So we are actually really talking about big data. And when we have millions of customers, the task of KYC know your customer is actually only something that can be handled with appropriate tools, with appropriate mechanisms and processes to make, and to make sure that we have that to long term customer relationship.
This is also an important aspect to provide actually a good user experience to get to this customer satisfaction. So what are we doing in the first place? We are actually getting customer information. So this is done through the onboarding process or through registration via social account. And from that starting point, we add additional information, for example, through user behavior on when they use the site or the mobile application through their preferences, actually we know lots about their location and devices and things. When they are using the service, for example, with a mobile device, then we take this information, these identity informations, and actually look how they are related to each other. So as I showed them this slide before we have relationships between organizations and apps and things and services and, and probably other items of information, even agents Oris, which, which act on behalf of a user, we have account linking and we have preferences and likes.
We have to understand what behavioral data means and what location data means for individual users. And maybe we can provide services on that basis. And of course, very important and very sensitive it's of course, health data that we more or less all collect through our smart watch mobile phone or the smart trackers on our wrist. And the next step of course, is using this information for business enablement, which means we want to serve the customer appropriately. Of course, we want to make business. And of course, everybody of us knows what, how, how bad email marketing looks like. So to get to a, a really dedicated and, and targeted email marketing and ad serving is an important aspect as well. So there's no nonsense approach is very important. And for example, direct customer interaction might help as well. If somebody's requiring a service or could require a services.
When we understand he's looking for a taxi or he's at the airport, and we know that the gate has changed, then we can push information there. So this three full three step processes is something that, that sir will focus on later on as well. So this might be a connection point for his top then as well. So if we want to achieve a complete picture, we of course have the consumer identity, which is, as I said, compiled through base data, behavioral data, the likes, the shares, and the purchases, the comments, the reviews, and much more that you all know from your own interaction with, with social media or with Amazon or wherever you do online business or communication, of course, context data, which means location time device, or where do you start your, your journey to this site or to this application, to a app store through the, through Google social data. Of course. And it's, it's great to understand that this Twitter account actually is the same person who has this Facebook account. Maybe we have still existing CRM data, which is available, and this should be correlated as well to this consumer identity from brick and mortar shops from, from yeah. Help desk interactions on this kind of work. And of course, external knowledge, well known of course, credit rating scores.
So custom identity management is, as I said, an evolution of IM and it's the, it's the basis for digital innovation. So we are talking about getting quick, getting agile and of of course, achieving customer satisfaction. When we talk about the data that is stored, we actually do not know what we will store tomorrow. So we have to make sure that the, the schema, the database schema is dynamic and adaptable so that we are able to store what is needed for enabling business today, of course, and tomorrow. So integration of, of all types of information dedicated to one type of business, for example, social data, historical data, preference, data, contextual information. Of course, this system custom I identity and access management as mentioned before, needs to be adequately scalable. That means various dimensions. Of course, the number of entries, as I said before, internet scale, the number and type of attributes per individual entry, which is again, a reference to the adaptable schema.
And the number of access is get at a given time. So this might be different from, from, from various aspects. So shopping online, shopping before Christmas might be a challenge for sites or social media usage during national or global events might be a challenge for these systems as well. And of course, we have to make sure that integration is, is available. And this is integration in various dimensions as well. So we ha want to make sure that all customer facing systems are having access to identity and authorization data. We might want to make sure that we integrate seamlessly with other identity providers, inbound, for example, reuse Twitter accounts or Facebook accounts to avoid registration in the first place, standardized access outbound, to make sure that we can provide information to other services as well through standardized protocols, which is actually the way to go, which is APIs, which is, or of Sam open it connect, and still the, the, the grown up on protocol like, like LD D.
And of course, if we run a service, if we run an online service dedicated for our special group of customers, we want to make sure that we can develop the right functionality and integrate the cm data into the system. So adequate API access is, is, is prerequisite to make sure that we get access to the full functionality provided by the identity and access management system. We are talking about security and data protection. I, I think some of you already were waiting for me saying that, and it's of course of importance. We need to have adequate security. And one important step at that point is adaptive authentication to actually understand that we do not, not do no longer have a, a perimeter for our systems. We are running our services in the cloud, as well as the cm, we are running the cloud. So the identity is the, is the means to identify a person and to give the right access.
So identity as the perimeter. And we want to make sure that we protect our customers, our consumers, our subscribers in a highly hostile environment, and that is the internet. So we want to make sure that we have risk based authentication and multifactor authentication to protect the highly critical transactions. Adequately platform. Security is a, is a must. Of course. So we are talking about cloud security and these systems of course, have to make sure that they are as secure as possible and as required for systems storing personally identifiable information. And of course the, the, one of the most important aspects, and this is really something that is really in the news already is data protection. We have to make sure that we follow the regulations and the laws of national national legislations, the individual data protection laws, which might be quite different from country to country.
And just mentioned is the upcoming European general data protection reg regulation, the GDPR, which go will go in full effect as far as I know, in spring 2018, but I have to make sure that you also understand, I have to mention it that I'm not a lawyer. I'm just talking about experiences here. So, but if you look at the EO general data protection regulation, I have just collected some highlights from the site where the URL is given to the right below, which you can, should check out if you are into providing such services, because there are some surprises for those who have not checked that out yet. So one really interesting aspect is the extraterritorial effect. That means if you are a non-EU controller or processor of, of data, but you are actually processing data for, for people located in the EU, you actually are subject to the EU general data protection regulation.
This is what we can expect from this reg regulation. And this is, is even not limited to the offering goods or services, so which require payment, but other services as well. You have to make sure that there is actually a legal basis for data processing, which is this, this, this buzzword consent. So the individual has to provide the consent for data processing, and it is limited for special purposes for, for special purposes. So just because you are actually providing information for a purchase that does not mean that you can easily reuse that information for, for marketing analytics. So it has to be made sure that this is appropriately done as well. The rights of the individuals are strengthened. So we have lots of more rights, including the, the right to be forgotten, to be raised from the memory of the, of the system, the, the restriction of processing, as I mentioned before, and for data portability, so that you can say, give me the data back.
I want to use it, or I want to check it just for my own purposes to make sure to understand what you're storing and another aspect, not a full list here, not a comprehensive list, just some highlights, automated decision making with of which is of course, many of the aspects that I mentioned before is automated decision making, making big data, know your customer, including profiling. There are high levels of, of regulation here, which should be met and must be met appropriately. And there are even regulations. For example, you cannot deny a credit just based solely on automated processing of, of information provided by a credit credit rating agency. This needs suitable safeguards. You make, I have to make sure that there is appropriate mechanisms in place. So finding the right balance is actually my final slide before I hand over to, to, so we have, in our opinion, and from the Analyst point of view, make sure that people really understand that user trust is, is key in a market that is around digital innovation.
So we have to understand the providing data to commercial platforms. We are talking about commercial platforms is a deliberate act and people, they try and they tend to exchange data against value, but they need to remain in control and they need to remain able to manage and revoke consent. And of course they have to make sure that they understand that actually the information is adequately protected, privacy security and data protect protection are key components, and they will get massively more important with the upcoming regulations that are just mentioned. So from our point of view, actually, it's good to have to understand this as a unique selling proposition, to make sure that we have easy and trustworthy self-service workflows to help the people help themselves. And from our point of view, the, the data protection by design and by default is a absolute must. So now that we know what we have to expect for 2018 or so, it's, it's a good idea to start right now to be ready for day one.
So getting to the right balance, it's actually making sure that we find the right balance between these different columns. So business enablement on the one hand and privacy and security on the other hand are really two sides of the same metal. And we have to understand that the solutions that we provide for our customers really have to meet these needs. And at that point, I want to hand over to tos of giga, but again, a short reminder to our participants, please feel free to add all of your questions into the questions panel on your screen. And we will come back to those questions later in the Q and a session after. So presentation so
Morning, good afternoon, everyone. No, really thank you for choosing to spend this soft time with us. And you know, what I'll do is I'll pick up from where Matthias left off. And I think the I'll talk briefly about what our identity and access management platform is and tie back to what Matthias was talking about in terms of how do you collect customer information? How do you actually process that information and eventually, how do you convert that into eventual business value? So our gigs custom identity management platform basically consists of three separate categories, which is basically connect and convert. And in the connect piece we have, what's the registration as a service, we'll really talk a little more about what functionality that actually provides and social login environs that we'll be using, and eventually how you continue engaging with customers. From there, you talk a little more about, you know, what collection of information, how exactly is stored and what kind of value, you know, how do you leverage that data eventually in the third part, which is essentially converting it into true business value.
So connecting with customers is an interesting thought area to start with as you know, kind of comparing and contrasting this with what we've seen in the traditional identity space. You know, we've always had captive identities with employees in the past, right? Employees or partners. We know who they are. There's a process of wetting before they actually become employees are partners. And there is clear control in terms of where's your single source of truth or identities. Now, when you start looking at custom identities, the key area here is, you know, customers can come in from multiple locations. They may have multiple different kinds of identities. And there's a significant value that each of these attributes of these identities actually can give you in order to make a complete picture of this user. So one of the key areas is how do I reduce the barrier to entry for a customer to self-identify of course, there's all these third party inform, you know, providers from which you can buy identity information, but that's, you know, if you start looking at the privacy regulations and particularly the data protection regulations that are coming up in EU, you'll actually see that, you know, user consent becomes a really critical part of it.
So you're better off looking for first party data. You're better off kind of simplifying the process of registration. You're better off providing better customer experience so that customers basically trust you and they come back and provide you with more information and, you know, there's richness in their experience. And OB obviously they also kind of expect, you know, data security with it, which is a given. So one of the key areas that we look at is, you know, how can you actually provide a simplified user registration process? And once the, which obviously means users can choose to register with on your site, they could be on the digital property itself. It could be using social login and again, social login, depending on which region they're coming in from. So obviously, you know, if they're coming in from some, an Asia Pacific, you want be able to provide them with local social login providers, as opposed to the ones, maybe in the us where Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and the kind are probably more popular.
And as customers spend more time, you, you know, the first thing you want to do is you wanna simplify the process of registration, give them as few fees as they need to kind of fill out and pro self-identify, but as they stay longer, you may wanna actually start looking at, you know, collecting more information from them. So, you know, start with just an email address and a password register, or, you know, then go in and say, Hey, can you tell me something about your interests? Can you tell me something about, you know, agenda so on, right? So things like that, which kind of over a period of time, make the whole experience richer for the user. And obviously we provide functionality like, you know, progressive profiling and conditional profiling, which help you do that. We also connect with multiple different social login providers across the globe, which makes it easier for you to kind of roll these products out.
And particularly when you you're a global company, which, which has customers across the world. So the other big challenge you also see is customers are coming in from multiple different channels. You know, it's not in the past what used to be rolled as a browser, you click, you go login and register and login into your target, right? On the other hand, you know, nowadays you basically have customers who were using kiosks. For example, mobile device is very calm. So how do you actually make sure that the interface that's provided to these customers is simple? There's, you know, it's kind of supported across multiple channels and all of this without compromising on both security, as well as user experience. So support from multichannels is something that definitely need to kind of keep in mind. And as, as you go further in, you know, there are multiple other authentication mechanisms that customers expect us to provide.
So it starts with a username and password, but of course, you know, as we move forward, depending on the kind of geographies in which you're supporting your customers could be biometrics touch ID, for example, on the apple phones, right? So iPhones or the equivalent on any of the Android devices, more, you know, more raw Asian countries, there's the passwordless authentication mechanisms. Things like what WhatsApp uses, for example, you tie the mobile device to maybe a one time password. And that becomes an initial face of authentication. As you build trust, as you build the relationship, you kind of enhance and contextualize the authentication provide risk based authentication. So what we are seeing is a significant change in user experience where customers want simplified user experience. They want better means of authentication. However, there's really no compromise on the kind of security that they actually have at the back end.
So in general, when you're looking at connecting your customers, which is basically part of what Matthias spoke about, which is how do I gather customer information? I want to look at ways in which I can simplify the process. I can, you know, the kind of people who are rolling out these applications to the customers are very different. It could be marketing teams in multiple in regions, which means the kind of API level access or the UI kind of access has to be, you know, kind of wide ranging because you don't know exactly which part of the, you know, which part of the organization is actually rolling these out in different parts of the work for your organization. So across brands, maybe. So what you wanna look at is a simplified process of collecting of basically connecting with customers and basically collecting all the customer information that they actually provide first party in order to provide a rich experience for these customers.
So once you've connected with customers, the next thing you basically are looking at, how do I collect information from them? What kind of information am I collecting again? Remember, this is all with user consent. Consent becomes very critical. However, as Matthias pointed out, you really are not sure exactly what the schema is going to be of the incoming data, which is the data model cannot be fixed because you're not sure what exactly is the process of a self-identification or registration or authentication that the customer is actually using, which means what you need at the back end is a very simple, but extremely flexible data storage mechanism. So, you know what you look the kind of data that you could be getting could be system data. It could be identity data that's provided by these social login provider. For example, it could be purchases, clicks, shares, commences, and so on.
So you want to store all of this information, build the customer user identity over a period of time. You also wanna be able to link the customer identities based on the credentials they're providing. So if the first time the user comes in with logs in with Facebook and subsequently they log in with a LinkedIn, you want to be able to connect those identities. You wanna be able to get a single view of that particular user in order to provide them with a rich experience. So if you look at what we actually provide, there are multiple ways in which, you know, we, as I mentioned, we collect this, we help connect with customers. We store this information, we basically normalize this data and we actually provide a single unified view. And more importantly, the schema that we actually use is a flexible schema, which essentially means that, you know, you can store huge amounts of unstructured data.
You can store data from multiple different sources. Obviously, as I mentioned, you know, kind of data, the sche of data that you're getting from say a Facebook is gonna be different from a LinkedIn. It's gonna be different from another provider on maybe something different from what you're collecting on your site. And so you really cannot fix on a specific schema. You kind of have provide a flexible data model and all of this eventually is gonna be used for delivering business value for your end customers. Now, one of the key areas that we actually work with is multiple different partners. And these are partners across various, you know, marketing solutions, there's recommendations and recommendation engines, the CMSs and eCommerce platforms, data management platforms. And what you want to do is once you've collected this user identity information, you want to move this as quickly as possible in order to provide realistic, personalized user experience for the customers on the one hand and on the other to derive significant business value.
So this is one of the key areas where years work significantly on actually building about 50 yard, you know, different integrations with backend systems. As you can see, there are quite a few that have that I've shown here. Now I'll take a couple of customer examples, American cancer society, as I mentioned, right? One of the key things is you really do not have customer, you know, there's no single source of truth for customers. And one of the things that American cancer society was looking at is how exactly can I get, you know, if there's a person who's donated money at a particular event and online, for example, and is then participating in some kind of a marathon or run for charity, how exactly do I identify that customer go and thank them. For example, it's a simple, you know, it's a simple token of appreciation, but very important to manage that customer experience.
They actually are using our platform in order to connect with various different, you know, other solutions that they have things around event management on web portals and so on to get a 360 view of their customer, it's a constituent 360 initiative as they call it. And they move that data across these different applications to get a view of the customer in order to basically improve the user experience, because it's very critical for them that these donations keep coming because that's the engine for essentially better engagement and solving these pro the problems that they're solving. So we actually have a white paper on this, if you're interested, and this is more on, you know, how do you get a single view of the customer? How do you connect with, with multiple different applications in order to stay and engage with the customer over a period of lifetime?
The other example, which goes to the connected devices that Matthias was talking about, which is, you know, we have a customer uni bill in Europe, and what they have done is they've actually used us in order to integrate with a smart parking system where they look at who's the customers coming in. They provide them a simple way in which they can actually enter a shopping center shopping mall. And from that point on actually push them out offers and so on. So in order to do that, they actually need to get a clear view of who these customers are, where are they coming in from? What are their interests and exactly how do I provide this real time information? And in addition to that, they are looking at tying into the, the loyalty and the, the engagement solutions that we actually provide and integrating it with what they actually provide today in order to give a real rich, real time experience for their customers.
So tying all this together, if you look at the giga platform on the one hand, we right at the top, we have mechanisms by which you can actually sup you know, connect with customers. So here we provide a very rich registration and access management solution. We have support for, you know, the typical standards that you see out there, open ID, connect, OAuth, Sam. And in addition to that, we support about 25 or social login providers out the box, which means your time to mark and time to value significantly reduces. Now, once you've done that, there's also the process of continuing engagement with these customers. So we actually look at, you know, collecting information from all these third, third party solutions around shares and reactions and commands in order, you know, enrich the profile of the user. Obviously from that point on, we look at how do you, you know, collect this information?
How do you store this information? How do you get a good view of who, what, what the customer information that you're storing is there's the process of the standard solutions around password reset and other things that we provide from our centralized identity management platform. So you can also run basic analytics, which is, you know, trying to identify who these users are. And there's more comprehensive customer insights that you can actually get in order to provide, say a segment of customers who have logged in using Facebook, who basically like certain things, for example, you can actually run these kind of customer insights on our, on our platform. Now, obviously from there, we look at how do you convert this information? We have the identity exchange that we provide, and, and there's the insights in the query tool with which you can start querying about specific customers and all the whole platform is actually built completely unrest APIs, which means that you can actually integrate with multiple different solutions apart from the ones that we actually provide connections for connectors for are out of the box. So we support about 50 different marketing and, you know, data management solutions for all of the box. But if there are ones that are say custom solutions, we actually are completely based on rest APIs, which means the integration become far simpler. So in, in short, in summary, this is what the gig platform is and not allow hand back to for questions.
Yeah. Great. Thank you for that great presentation. We are now moving over to the Q and a session, and again, a final reminder to our audience to please enter their very own questions into the questions panel of the, of the go-to webinar panel. And there's still a chance to contribute and to have your question answered in the, in this session. Okay. First question, what you, you were talking about integration with, with marketing applications and from your experience, what are the, the applications that your customers are actually looking at? What is the, what is the, the, the core of use cases for when it comes to marketing?
Sure. So let me, let me actually go to this specifics slide here.
Oh, we've changed over to me.
Okay. So some of the key solutions that we actually connect to our, you know, data management platforms, things like Adobe audience manager products, blue Kai eCommerce solutions, as well know, these are ones which things like SAP hybrid, Oracle commerce, and what we see majority of our customers, you know, look at integrations for is how exactly can I get specific customer identity information in order to provide a rich experience. And more personalization is one part, but also, you know, deriving better business value because at the end of the day, our, you know, in the past our aspiration goal and identity and access management has always been, you know, how do we actually drive top line revenue? But if you, you know, the, the storyboard was not really strong in the past, but what we've done here is because of the connectivity that we provide and we, the way in which we can actually provide this information, identity attributes to downstream applications, it really starts impacting top line revenue because all these are specifically these solutions that customers use in order to make purchases in order to make decisions in order to make, you know, specific value added, you know, actions as well.
So the kind of applications that we typically integrate with are e-commerce CMS data management platforms and recommendation engines and so on.
Okay, great. Thank you. I've mentioned it as well, but, but do you think that customers and customers, customers do understand privacy and security already as a key direct differentiator as I postulated? Or is this really the case?
I think to a large extent, we do see customers understand that. I mean, we've seen many instances where, for example, you know, in the past, people have actually depended on say third party data or enterprise customers have depended on third party data in order to personalize experiences. However, what's changing significantly is that, you know, you have completely wrong pieces of information that's actually provided as an end customer. When I go to your digital property, that's killing user experience, which means the whole customer acquisition cost that you've you've put front is, is definitely impacted. In addition to that, it also exposes the fact that you're actually buying something from someone else, which significantly reduces trust. So, and that directly correlates to the kind of data privacy that you actually manage. So, yes, in many ways I think customers are aware, but the newer regulations are definitely going to reemphasize that further.
Right. But as I mentioned, the, the, the aspect to do it now to be prepared and properly to be better than the competitor, this is as you've mentioned also, also an aspect already because I, as a user, but I'm not a typical user, I would say yes. If I think the platform is really looking at my personal data at my privacy, that would be a pro for me, of course, in the plus. And, and I, I think there is a, there is a group of, of customers, but, but I actually do not know how big it is, but, but yeah, understood when, when we talk about C I a M we are talking, we are talking about C being customer, but, but usually we, we see also platforms where we have citizens or ECIS or e-government platforms. Is this something that you are looking also at, when you are marketing your product, your platform,
You know, from our perspective, we are kind of agnostic of what kind of identities these customers actually bring. In many instances, you know, you look at identities that are coming in from social network. Providers are self registered users, but, you know, because we stand support all the standards that are out there from an authentication perspective and so on, it's pretty straightforward because most of these entities, whether they're government or enterprises, they basically support things like Sam, which means because we are both an identity provider and a service provider, we can actually consume identities and we are kind of agnostic of what these identities are. So, oh, you know, let's take the example of American cancer society itself, right? So these are, for all purposes, they are donors, but they're also regular citizens. So yes, in, in many ways the platform is kind of agnostic of where exactly these identities coming from.
Okay, great. I think this is what I expected, but, but yeah. Good to hear that, that it's not only marketing, but it's really something that, that is focused on, on various use cases. One question is the, the question of governance and data quality issues. Once you collected the information. I think the getting more information about actually the, the connect takes place is an important factor too. I quote, since too many sources might have not a single key to identified customers, how do you connect it information reliably and secure and yeah. With respect to, to data quality, but also to, to governance to make sure it is correct because you base decisions on that.
Sure. We, we do have a process of normalizing data based on specific attributes. There is also the way in which we can link identity information specifically based on what the customer themselves provide. And in addition to that, we actually have integrations with, you know, data management platforms, as well as I mentioned, and we are looking at ways in which we can integrate with, you know, major MDM solutions. And as you can imagine, right, the quality of the data is important. And, and to a large extent, because you're looking at identity attributes, you want to look at what's provided first party by the customers in order to make some of these decisions while integrating with solutions in the back end. And I can go into much deeper detail, you know, offline, but exactly how do you integrate with other solutions that actually say clean up this data in multiple ways? That's something that we do behind the scenes as well.
Okay, great. Thank you. Maybe another point when it comes also to security and, and, and segregation of duties and is you are collecting information from various sources and, and I think one, one important factors or important point is then when a customer is also a, an employee of the organization, which actually runs the service. So that could be a, a legal issue for on the one hand being a customer and ordering something. And on the other hand, being the employee, who's actually dealing with the, with the order. But as I understood, you can also consume information from the IAM system, the traditional enterprise scale IAM system to identify these issues.
Yeah. So there two, two things that we need to look at, right. One is what's your customer identity information. The second is administrative use of the data and the administrative identity. So we've seen many CU, many of our, well, majority of our 700 customers eventually are, you know, large enterprise customers who have global presence, which means they do have existing solutions that they have in place for managing, you know, employee identities. And in many ways we do get integrations from them in terms of, you know, who these employees are, what groups they belong to, how do we consume that information actually make them part of the administrative groups and how do we actually, you know, and there's a complete authorization model that we have for administrative users within our platform. So yes, there's a clear, you know, way in which we can delineate administrative users from the, from the end users. That's one part, I think the second thing that you need to keep in mind is the fact that because we support standard identity protocols, things like SAML, things like open ID connect. And so on, one of the key things we can actually do is integrate with any of these existing solutions because they support these protocols as well, these standards as well. So yes. Long, long answer to your question, but yes, definitely. We do.
Okay, great. Yeah. 1, 1, 1 question from the audience very interesting. Should, should have been my question, actually, a success case, a success story for, for bank. Is there something like that and actually using your system also for authenticating customers, bank customers, to have access via mobile applications or mobile sites to their, to their bank account and doing transfers and stuff.
Yeah. So there, there are definitely examples of this, but what I would do is I'll definitely take that question offline for a specific reason, because we do have confidentiality and so on with the specific customers that we have. But, you know, as you think about it, there are two aspects to most customers, even with financial services. One is how do I, you know, how do I make sure that I provide a user experience, proper user experience to put people who are basically browsing my digital property and they may not be, they may not have identified or logged in as a banking customer, which means you basically get into things around identity proofing and so on. And how do you elevate that level of authentication when they actually log into a bank and carry transactions and so on. So absolutely happy to answer that offline just because of some of the, you know, agreements that we have. But yes, we do have plenty of use cases on, in the financial services sector as well.
Okay, great. Thank you. I think that's it for today's questions. And of course, if as you said to cover these questions also offline, we will, of course be available via email for, for further questions. And this is true for, of course, for, from, from gig, for me, from, for cooking a coal side. And of course, if you have the chance to drop by in Munich, giga will be there. We will be there and lots of other interesting customers and, and, and vendors and, and yeah, thought leaders will be there as well. So if you have a chance to come over to Cola EIC in, in MUN, in Munich in may, please drop by and, and have a chat for that. And, and any other case, please feel free to contact, sir, and me via email for further questions. So that's it for today, I would like to thank the participants of today's webinar. And of course I would like especially to thank rash for his expertise and experience and well done presentation. I think this was a real great look into the real life aspects of customer identity and access management. And we're really looking forward to seeing you again, or hearing you again, or reading you again, you know, webinar and that's it for today. Thank you for being with us today. Have a great day and goodbye.