Identity Is

Ryan Carlson:  Thanks Alyssa.

Welcome everybody. It's great to have you guys here. That documentary that we showed at the beginning I think is great because you guys are here at this forum today because you're involved in identity management or identity and security or identity and access management in some way. So when we use the term identity, we're typically talking about products or technology. But that documentary lets us explore identity on a person level. 

We think identity is so many different things. In fact, we talk with our customers about what identity means to them, and we see a lot of things like this. Identity is the new parameter. Identity is immutable. Identity is a must, like fine wine. Really love talking with our customers, interacting with them around the concept of what identity is. 

What I want to do this morning to kick off the event is talk about that in a couple of different ways. Specifically how identity can be security. Today as every application moves to the Cloud, as people use mobile devices, you need, in order to secure an enterprise, you need to know everything there is about your employees, about your users, about your contractors, the people inside your company. And identity can help keep you secure. 

But identity is about more than that. Identity is also about a better experience. If you know everything you need to know about your customers, you can give them a better product or a better service. You can give them a better experience. And those two things, security and experience, have typically been at odds. We think with a focus on identity, they can be brought together and identity truly can be everything. 

What I want to do though to illustrate that is just tell you some stories about customers who have done that. And we think that we're lucky because some of the world's largest enterprises have turned to Okta for identity to either make their workforces secure or to make products and services for their customers with a better experience. 

But it's not just large global companies like you see here, it's also people who are near you. Your neighbors. People like Jones Lang LaSalle. People like Kohle's. People like NextTier. I loved walking here this morning and seeing the CNA logo on the large building right next door. It's companies everywhere, globally and locally. 

I want to start with a couple of stories because the Okta Identity Cloud we think is something new and different. It takes identity at its core and enables companies to do things they couldn't do before. What can the Okta Identity Cloud do for you? We'll start with a story of a company called Engie. 

First, every company needs to move faster than they have in the past. Agility is more necessary and more pressing than ever before, and one way that large companies can remain agile is through mergers and acquisitions. 

And Engie is one of the world's largest energy producers. They're based in Paris, France. They're actually formerly known as GDF Suez. The heritage of the company goes back to 1858. They were part of creating the Suez Canal in Egypt. They've grown their company throughout this 100 plus year in a lot of ways but more recently through mergers and acquisitions. They're not just producing natural gas now. They're now producing solar energy. Energy from wind farms. And growing their company in this way led to a very fragmented IT environment. They had over 100 different active directory domains across multiple different companies, and they had 150,000 employees who needed to access systems on top of this fragmented infrastructure. 

Engie turned to the Okta Identity Cloud as a virtual layer on top of this active directory infrastructure, and not only did they roll out Office 365 to these 150,000 employees, they did that in two months. And now, not only are those employees more productive, but now Engie has a better stance and a better agility for mergers and acquisitions in the future. Now, a company that they buy, instead of taking two months to integrate their active directory, they can do that in weeks. Engie is now more agile because of identity and the Okta Identity Cloud. 

But you can also create a secure and seamless experience for your customers, and a great example of that is Adobe. Everybody's familiar with Adobe. They make iconic products like Photoshop and Illustrator, but they are transforming their company as well. They're taking those products that used to download and install onto a PC and offering them up as a Cloud service. So Creative Suite as it used to be known is now known as Creative Cloud, and that is a big transformation for any company, but it is especially transition for Adobe. 

But one thing about Adobe, they don't just sell these products to consumers, they sell Creative Cloud to some of the world's largest enterprises. And enterprises don't just need a seamless experience, they need a secure experience. 

Adobe turned to identity to make sure that the Creative Cloud SaaS applications that they connected to their enterprise customers was secure. They used the Okta Identity Cloud through the APIs and technologies that you hear about today to build identity and security directly into their SaaS service. They used identity to give their enterprises a secure experience. 

Another example is collaborating with partners. Nobody can succeed in business today without significant partnerships, and collaboration with those partnerships can move your business forward. A great little example of that is a company called Flex. Flex is the largest contract manufacturer in North America. Their business is essentially assembling and testing and shipping complex electronic equipment like switches and routers, consumer electronics like PCs or gaming devices, and they do that with 200,000 different employees spread around the world in 30 different countries. 

But Flex used to be known as a company called Flextronics because they assemble electronics, but they've transformed themselves into a new company called Flex because now they're assembling equipment like Nike's cutting-edge sporting good and apparel equipment. 

If you look at Flex's business, it's essentially a supply chain business. They work with tens of thousands of suppliers to bring their products into their factories, assemble them, and ship them as quickly as they can. Then if you look at what identity can do for a company like Flex, we can help streamline their supply chain. 

Before using the Okta Identity Cloud, Flex's suppliers had to log into 12 different portals to do things like check inventory, ERP managing, invoices, RMAs. The Okta Identity Cloud streamlined that to one single place for their tens of thousands of suppliers to access giving them a more streamlined and agile supply chain. But what we really did for them is secure that supply chain. 

If you know everything about your suppliers, you know who should and should not have access to their systems. We gave that to Flex. Gave them both agility and a seamless experience for their suppliers but also a secure supply chain as well. 

And then identity can also help you tackle what's next. And the API economy is something that you've all heard about. You're going to hear more about it today. Identity can help you secure the API economy. Pitney Bowes is a more than 100-year-old company that has built businesses in things like metering equipment for postage or shipping or logistics, and all of these businesses have been used to enable more than 90% of the Fortune 500. Pitney Bowes is used by almost any company that you will have bought a product or service from. 

But they looking at how do they modernize these service they've built. How do they modernize these capabilities that they've had that they've built over the last 100 years. The way to do that is to put APIs in front of all of them, and then they can take their technologies and offer that to an entirely new class of customers. In this case, small and medium-size businesses. 

Pitney Bowes has built what they call the Commerce Cloud, and what they really want to do is expose the things that they've built through APIs and let other people build on top of it. That introduces a new challenge. How do you secure and manage the access to these APIs? 

Pitney Bowes has turned to the Okta Identity Cloud to manage access amongst APIs using protocols like [inaudible 00:07:44], which you'll hear about today, they let companies build applications and services on top of their existing infrastructure and offer up all they have built over the last 100 years to an entirely new category of customers. 

The companies I've talked about are large companies who have been around, in a couple of cases more than 100 years. But identity can also help you build a 100% Cloud and mobile IT infrastructure, and a great example of this is a local story, School of Rock. School of Rock's mission is, in my opinion, very admirable. They help teach kids how to be musicians after school. The way that they do that is through a franchise model. They have 170 different schools around the country that enable their mission, but they're all different franchises. They're not centrally organized, and the people who are running these School of Rock music schools, they're musicians, they're not IT professionals. 

School of Rock has the challenge of enabling them to use the tools to get their jobs done, and they turned to the Cloud to make that easy to do. But what they need then is a centralized platform that can tie it all together; provision access, make sign on easy, eliminate multiple passwords. Identity and specifically the Okta Identity Cloud lets School of Rock do that. 

The last thing that I want to talk about is the fact that if you look at all of the things you're going to hear today, identity is about connecting technologies. It's about provisioning applications. It's about securing devices. It's about connecting APIs. 

But we also think, as I mentioned up front, identity is more than just that. Identity is about people. In fact, this room is so packed I have to do this. I'm going to take a quick selfie here of you guys. Would you guys do me a favor? Would you all put your hands up really quick? 

Yes. Okay. Wait. Wait. All right. Thank you. Identity is personal. It's about people. We think that the people who work in identity, who work in security, who work in IT have great individual stories. I'm going to play a video here in just as second that highlights just a couple of those. We think that these stories in particular capture the unique aspects of individuals. Not just in their work life but in their personal lives, so let's play this video really quickly. 

(Video) - Alvin:  I'm a closet artist, but I'm an IT guy. I think identity is something you need to define. But you have to explore it. 

(Video) - Brian:  One of the things we always say in wrestling is that the best character is yourself turned up to 11. If you get stuck in your one identity you don't develop and grow as a person. 

(Video) - Alana:  To be the best that I can be just drives me, and I just never want to settle for status quo. 

Ryan Carlson:  Those stories of Alvin the sculpture, of Brian the wrestler, and Alana the bodybuilder at Okta.com/Identities, you can see full versions of their individual stories. They're very compelling. They're very unique. I would encourage you to go check them out. But that also gives you the ability to share your stories. We would love to hear your personal stories as well because identity can transform your companies. Identity can make these technologies work better together, but identity can connect us all as individuals as well. So with that, thank you guys for coming. Enjoy the day.