Oktane18: Day 2 Morning Keynote
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Speaker 2: Ladies, and gentlemen, please welcome back, Ryan Carlson.
Ryan Carlson: Welcome back, did you guys have fun at the party last night? Did you enjoy it? I wouldn't know, I didn't go. They don't let me go to those things. I want to start by thanking our Titanium Sponsor Box who helped make that party happen, and all of our sponsors. Please join me in thanking our sponsors.
Ryan Carlson: The day two keynote at Oktane is one of my favorite parts every year, because we get to showcase how many of our customers are going beyond the status quo, beyond what they've done before, and how identity helps them do so, but the day two keynote is also one of my favorites, because I get to introduce our keynote speaker. We have an informal tagline at Okta, we say, 'Connect everything', and Frederic Kerrest is the living, breathing manifestation of that mantra.
Ryan Carlson: He connects closely with our customers, our partners, our investors, all of our employees, and he combines that connection with the relentless pursuit, and drive to make sure that we are the best company that we can possibly be, but that drive goes beyond Okta.
Ryan Carlson: Not long ago, my wife, and I were invited to a dinner with Frederick, and his wife, some friends, and the night was all around raising awareness, and raising funds to help fight poverty in the San Francisco Bay area, and beyond. Freddy does so much for our company, but he does so much for his community as well. I'm lucky to call him a friend, and I'm very proud to introduce him to the stage this morning. Please join me in welcoming our co founder, and COO, Frederic Kerrest, Freddy.
Freddy Kerrest: Good morning, and welcome to Oktane18 day three, and our morning keynote. I am thrilled to be here. I see a couple of empty seats in the room now. I don't understand. I know there are enough people here at Oktane18 to fill every single seat, because I saw that happen at yesterday afternoon's keynote.
Freddy Kerrest: So, I'm going to assume that the truancy is due to last night's party, and has nothing to do with people's interest, and the difference in the interest between yesterday afternoon's keynote speaker, and this morning's keynote speaker. That's going to make me feel a little bit better about myself. All right, so thank you, I appreciate it. Good.
Freddy Kerrest: So, today I have the distinct pleasure of speaking with you this morning. You've heard a lot over the last couple of days about identity, how we think about identity, the evolution of identity, where we see identity going in the world, but today, we're going to turn the lens around.
Freddy Kerrest: We're going to go from talking about Okta, and what we're doing to focusing on all of you, our prospects, our customers, our partners, and we're going to talk about how you can take advantage of the opportunities that are ahead of you, how you can think about the exciting projects that you have, and how you're going to take advantage of those, and also how you can ensure that the projects, the products, the systems, the programs that you have, you're building them, thinking about the future, ensuring that what you're doing today is going to be future-proof.
Freddy Kerrest: This morning, we are going to talk a little bit about some of the largest trends that we see happening in our customer base when we're fortunate to go out there, and talk to more than 4,000 enterprise customers that we have today. Things like the growing role, and responsibility of the CIO, and the office of IT, the convergence of the security industry around identity, and finally, every company, every organization around the world, the need, the importance of always improving your customer experience.
Freddy Kerrest: We're also going to speak with a few of our forward-thinking customers today about how they're moving their businesses forward, about how they're staying ahead of competition in an ever changing world, and about some of the trends, and the technologies that they see, and that they're taking advantage of.
Freddy Kerrest: After that, I'm going to turn it over to a couple of our product leaders to talk about our product roadmap, give you an idea of where we're going, how we're thinking about it, so that you have that in mind as you're building your own roadmap, and your own plans, and then finally, we're going to talk about how we continue to innovate in the customer journey as we continue to take the feedback, the guidance, the advice that you give us in helping you become successful not only with our platform, but with the Okta integration network, and all of our suite of partners that are out there.
Freddy Kerrest: So, there's little doubt that technology has changed drastically, very quickly, and certainly in our lifetimes, and the pace of technological progress continues to accelerate. Over the last 400 years, we've seen four different industrial revolutions. The first in the 1700's started with the use of power, the use of water, excuse me, and steam to mechanize power.
Freddy Kerrest: We were introduced to the steam engine, and following that, the railroad. 200 years later, the second revolution began, and was marked by the use of electricity to power mass production. We were introduced to the light bulb, the telephone, the Telegraph, the internal combustion engine, and much more. You see, that difference there is 200 years. Now, we're going to 100 years later, the start of the computer revolution when many of the folks in this room, myself included, happened upon the technology scene.
Freddy Kerrest: Ted Hoff's invention of the microprocessor in 1969 sparked a series of technological innovations, and revolutions: The laptop, and desktop computer, the local, and wide area network, enterprise software, and the internet. Since the 70's, and 80's, we have seen a complete transformation of social networks, of business, and of communication, and now less than 40 years later, we're already in the fourth industrial revolution.
Freddy Kerrest: We are seeing the half life of technology accelerate in front of our very eyes. Today, we're beginning to see the marriage of the physical, and advanced digital technologies, things like the Internet of things, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and more. Technology is disappearing, and it is becoming inherent in our everyday lives.
Freddy Kerrest: So much so that I have two children under the age of five, and when I'm a home once in awhile in the evening, and I'll ask them for a moment of peace, and quiet, they will walk over to the plastic cylinder sitting in the corner of the room, and say, 'Alexa, play Poison, Dead Flies louder.'
Freddy Kerrest: Now, I promise you I had never heard of the song, Dead Flies. I knew a little bit about Poison, and certainly the idea that these two children who can't read have figured out how to communicate in today's modern world with computers through voice, and giving them commands is fascinating.
Freddy Kerrest: Now, of course my almost five-year-old usually leads the charge, and the three year old kind of mutters, and screams, and doesn't understand why Alexa doesn't work for her, but we're getting there, we're getting there. When it comes to technology innovation, I know that many of the folks in this room are at the forefront of leading this innovation, and leading this technology, and I want to walk through just a few of my favorite customer examples.
Freddy Kerrest: The first one is ENGIE, global energy powerhouse headquartered in France. Today, ENGIE is exploring the use of blockchain to optimize the consumption, and maintenance when it comes to the traceability of water, electricity, and natural gas. They're setting up blockchain infrastructure on sets of connected meters to get a better idea of how water flows back, and forth. Another great example, Dubai International Airports, the busiest airport in the world by international passenger traffic.
Freddy Kerrest: This year, they will host about 85 million passengers will transit through that airport. The airport security line, as you all know, is not the greatest place in the world, but Dubai International Airports is working very hard to make the experience better every single day. They have announced that next year, they're going to be dropping human security checks in favor of biometric scanning.
Freddy Kerrest: As you walk through the virtual aquarium pictured behind me here, the virtual fish will scan your face to ensure that you are who you say you are, and allow you entry into the country, or into the ongoing flight where you're transiting to. Certainly Allergan, Allergan Pharmaceuticals, one of our longest tenured enterprise customers since 2011.
Freddy Kerrest: Allergan is a global pharmaceutical company focused on developing, manufacturing, commercializing all sorts of medical devices, and drugs. Their aim is to give patients a Fitbit-like experience with wearable devices. Take for example, this medical device, it's called TrueTear, and it allows patients to temporarily increase natural tear production with user controllable neurostimulation.
Freddy Kerrest: When you pair this device with a smartphone, you can get weather ahead of time to understand pollen, temperature, wind, pollution, and with that you can understand the effects it's going to have on your eyes, and you can adjust the dosage accordingly. Finally, right here in this hotel, MGM Resorts International, they are working very, very hard every day to improve, and personalize the customer experience in ways hopefully that you have experienced positively this week.
Freddy Kerrest: MGM is innovating in your very rooms. I'm sure that you noticed with things like one touch, and voice command, and they are turning your phone very soon into your room key. So, there's no doubt that everyone here in this room is innovating, but you're all in different places in your digital journeys. Some of you are way up in the clouds, way ahead of everyone else. Others are just trying to convince their CEOs that cloud is here to stay, and that hybrid is the default modern enterprise architecture.
Freddy Kerrest: Regardless of where you are in the digital journey, you're certainly innovating each, and every day, which is why it's surprising, if not shocking to think that 100 years ago, the then commissioner of the US Patent Office said that everything that can be invented has been invented. Sorry, are you okay over there? Someone took that very personally. Not even 100 years ago, let's just roll back to 2003 15 years ago when the Harvard Business Review's editor-at-large Nicholas Carr made the now laughable claim that IT doesn't matter.
Freddy Kerrest: He said that the core functions of IT, data storage, processing, transport were available, and affordable to all. He said that they were just a commodity, not a strategic resource, and that IT was just becoming the cost of doing business, available to everyone with a distinction to none. Now, today we know that you are all focused on more complicated workflows, and orchestration than ever before, and we know that many of you are distinguished for your work in IT, and how you're moving your companies forward.
Freddy Kerrest: The role of the CIO, in fact, is no longer just about internal business processes, it's now about complex integrations across entire ecosystems, internal, and external systems, and people. Now, if you were in IT 20 years ago, I'm going to take a guess that you might have been spending some of your time just babysitting blinking lights in a data center.
Freddy Kerrest: It took months, sometimes years to get data out of the systems. As the supply chain modernized, we started talking about just-in-time data, but today, we're leveraging data to look ahead. With artificial intelligence, and machine learning, we are getting products on shelves before consumers know that they even need them. IT is no longer worried about blinking lights on a server.
Freddy Kerrest: The role now is increasingly to interpret data, and to make revenue generating decisions. In fact, McKinsey recently predicted that in the coming years we're going to have a shortage of 250,000 data scientists. So just to get this right, in the last 15 years, we've gone from, 'IT doesn't matter', to IT is so critical that we're going to be 250,000 folks short of the key people who drive our companies, our industries, and our economy forward. The transformation of IT from a back office function, to the interpreter, and feedback loop for the business sets a very exciting stage for today's CIOs.
Freddy Kerrest: I would go so far as to argue that it is the most exciting time in the history of technology to be a CIO. It's also probably one of the most challenging, with the highest expectations, and the most visibility. Today, the CIO is setting many of the most strategic priorities for the company, and in many ways, is ultimately responsible for the success of the business in any organization, which begs the question: Is today's CIO, tomorrow's CEO?
Freddy Kerrest: Who better to give us some added perspective on this than our first guest, an IT leader who has been in the IT industry as a CIO of Fortune 500 companies for 20 years. Currently, as the CIO of a Fortune 15 company. Cardinal Health, that company is an integrated healthcare services, and products company providing customized solutions for hospitals, for pharmacies, for health systems around the world.
Freddy Kerrest: Talk about undergoing massive disruption, I can not think of an industry more under the gun today than the healthcare industry. To talk a little bit about this, please join me in welcoming to the stage, Patty Morrison, the CIO of Cardinal Health. Patty. Nice to see you, thanks for coming. Not only just in time data, but just in time seating. Perfect. Thank you. Well, good morning. Nice to have you.
Patty Morrison: Thanks. Great to be here, hi everyone.
Freddy Kerrest: So, you've seen a lot over the last 20 years as a multi-time CIO of Fortune 500 companies. Maybe you can just start by telling the audience about a little bit about the evolution of what you've seen over the last 20 years, how not only your function, but the leadership that you've seen has changed a little bit.
Patty Morrison: Okay, great. Well, it's interesting. We use a lot of buzzwords in the industry. Today, it's digital transformation, and I've been doing this for over 35 years, and I've been doing digital transformation the entire time. I've been doing big data, it just is in different cycles in a different quantity.
Patty Morrison: So in some respects, the work hasn't changed. What has changed is the focus on external customers more than the internal enterprise. I think that is a major evolution, and the need to focus your organization, including your business leaders on the impact of technology on business models, on integration into your ecosystem, as you said, so I think that work is quite different today.
Freddy Kerrest: I also think that in speaking with you, and a lot of your peers, what we hear a lot is about modernizing IT. You know, there's a saying that IT doesn't throw anything away, what they do is they kind of glue new things on the front.
Patty Morrison: Our business partners like to do that too.
Freddy Kerrest: They like to do that too.
Patty Morrison: Don't like to get rid of features, they just like to add them.
Freddy Kerrest: That's right. So, probably part of your role in that world since digital transformation is something that you've been doing for a long time is just think about modernization. How you take kind of what you have, and what works, and then think about how you can bring in new technologies, and modernize your existing environment.
Patty Morrison: Yeah. I think one of the characteristics that's really grown is the need for speed, and so when we talk about modernizing our architectures, it's about how do we create speed. You know, six week, eight week regression tests in waterfall methodologies for example, aren't fast enough. So, to the extent that we take advantage of contemporary architectures, the cloud, Agile, Dev ops kind of all in combination, we can go faster, and I think that's imperative right now.
Freddy Kerrest: It's pretty amazing that as the CIO of a Fortune 15 company, you're up here talking to us about cloud, and Dev ops, and I've heard you say that every business needs to become an IT business. So, that's probably part, and parcel of that.
Patty Morrison: Yeah. You know, it used to be in, and many of you in IT will notice it, that our partners would say it's time for IT. You need to learn the business, and I think the opposite is happening. Business leaders need to learn IT, because IT is fundamental to the services, that's true in our industry.
Patty Morrison: You know, we're working for example, to improve medication adherence for patients, and that takes connectivity between a pharmacist, the patient, the physician, and how do we enable that to happen through services, and in each of those services platforms, there's embedded technology.
Patty Morrison: So you know, it's just that that becomes the role of the business leader, and we have to spend a lot of time, as some thing that's changed for me is educating all of my business partners about how to be an IT person, which is pretty different. They don't all like it.
Freddy Kerrest: And you have to do that in an environment that obviously is under pressure from all sides. You're obviously doing very, very well. Your organization is doing very well, but you're under pressure from all sides. Your company has north of $100 billion of revenue, so your IT budget is probably bigger than many companies revenues.
Freddy Kerrest: How do you think about balancing innovation with, 'I have to make sure that regulatory compliance is all taken care of', and how do you think about, 'Okay, there's some of this', it's kind of like walking, and chewing gum. 'I have to walk, and make sure I'm taking care of all the regulation, but at the same time, I want to be innovating, making every business an IT business.' How do you think about that balance?
Patty Morrison: Well, that's true, you always have to balance with whatever industry you're in. You have data protection, you have different regulatory environments. One of the things I think technology can really help with is automation.
Patty Morrison: So, how do you move fast, do the regulation, do the compliance, do the security, but do it in a way that you can automate a lot of the work, so that you're not having to recreate it each time, and in healthcare it's difficult, because a lot of our partners like large health systems have pretty antiquated technology footprints on their own, so the more that we apply automation, artificial intelligence to actually making that happen in the background, we can continue to meet the needs, and add feature, and add capability, but it's always a balance.
Freddy Kerrest: If I ask you to look in your crystal ball, what are some of the things that you think are going to happen in the healthcare landscape just in the coming five, or 10 years, and there's going to be some winners, and some losers, and you're sitting right in the middle of that connected to so many different pieces, and how do you see that shifting, and changing?
Patty Morrison: Well, I think one of the things that will change is the role of the patient. You know, with the cost of health care where it is, and there's lots of reasons, and it's a very circular industry, and there's a lot of incentives that are out of whack, but the patient is getting more, and more responsible, and visible for managing their cost of health care, managing their own health care, and that responsibility needs to increase.
Patty Morrison: And I think for a long time it was just taken care of out there by somebody, and with deductibles being higher, patients are going to demand more transparency, and have more choice, and good old fashioned consumerism, and capitalism is going to push the industry to be more efficient, and I think it's going to take some time, but I think that the role of the patient is going to be the driver.
Freddy Kerrest: That's great, and then obviously for the folks in the room, many of them are customers, some of them are prospects thinking about how they can use a service.
Patty Morrison: Yeah, I think my Cardinal team is out there.
Freddy Kerrest: Your Cardinal team is out there. Oh, there you go. Wow, your Cardinal team is even getting an applause. That's more applause than I got. I'm really disappointed. Are you hiring, Patty?
Patty Morrison: I am.
Freddy Kerrest: Good, good. I'll keep that in mind. Sorry. So, back to Okta. So, can you share a little bit about what you're doing with Okta today, how we've helped you a little bit in our journey. We're a couple of years into working together as partners. Kind of how we've helped you so far, and kind of where you see the partnership going.
Patty Morrison: You know, I have loved Okta since the first dating session I had at Andreessen Horowitz, and I saw like six companies, and they showed me all these health care stuff, and they said to me, 'Which do you like?' I'm like, 'Oh my God, I love Okta', I didn't even know.
Freddy Kerrest: That's because I was there, it was me.
Patty Morrison: They said, 'This is brilliant', and so have looking at our identity journey, and we've had classic historical softwaring capability, and our team gets a lot of push to innovate, and take some risks. So we started working with Okta, we did MFA, that was of our first implementations, and now we're on our SSO journey, and kind of embedding it into many of our customer facing applications.
Patty Morrison: One of the things that I believe very strongly in, and we as a team focus on is removing friction from the process for our customers, and so many of our applications touch external customers: Patients, pharmacists, clinicians, nurses, and they have so much on their plate, so we don't want to make it hard for them to do business with us, and so I think that your capability is going to help us remove that friction as we go forward, and make it faster for us to deliver applications to those environments.
Patty Morrison: So, we're really excited. We've loved the support we've been getting from your team. That's also important, especially as a newer company. How do you support a large enterprise? There's sometimes trepidation with new technology, can you scale with us? And we haven't seen that as a problem. I think the things that you can do better, just make implementation easier. It's not always straightforward, we've had some challenges that we worked through, but we worked through that with your team, but that's something that I would probably say to everybody.
Freddy Kerrest: That's great.
Patty Morrison: Anyway, but we've been really, really happy.
Freddy Kerrest: Well, that's great, and then of course you've got an entire roadmap digest in three minutes backstage. Rich was there, so that worked out pretty well for you.
Patty Morrison: It was great, thanks. Sounds like you guys will hear some really great stuff, and we're really excited about working with you.
Freddy Kerrest: Excellent. Well, please join me in thanking Patty very much. Thanks Patty, it was nice to speak with you. So, as Patty just shared, Cardinal Health is evolving IT in many ways, particularly thinking about the needs of people: Their own people internally, their customers, their partners, their suppliers, and many things in the future.
Freddy Kerrest: We know that Patty, and her organization, as well as all of you are thinking a lot about people, about modernizing IT, about how you can enhance your existing environments, but you're also thinking a lot about security, and thinking about the different components of security, and how they can affect the different programs that you have, whether those are for employee facing business units, whether those are for customer facing environments, whether those are for partner facing supply chains, and whether you are responsible for security all by yourself today, or you're doing it in partnership with your security organization, this is an ever increasing priority.
Freddy Kerrest: So, let's shift gears a little bit, and talk about security, and what that means. 15 years ago, if I worked for you, and you let me go, you would take away my badge to the building, and my VPN token, and I would be effectively de-provisioned from all the systems. It didn't matter when you took me out of the Oracle user database, because I couldn't get access to any corporate data if I was outside the four walls of the firewall, and I couldn't get on the corporate network.
Freddy Kerrest: Today, obviously it's very, very different with company confidential, and critical information stored in public cloud applications, and on mobile devices, and if you let that rogue account executive go, you need to make sure that you de-provision them instantly from all the systems before they go home, login, download the entire forecast, and bringing it across the street to the competition. It's a very different world.
Freddy Kerrest: Now, organizations used to protect themselves by quartering themselves off from the rest of the world, basically trusting everyone inside the firewall, but perimeter security was easily breached, and once an intruder got inside the firewall, they basically had access to everything in the corporate network. After 10 years of massive breaches, and the biggest year of online fraud, we know that this approach doesn't work anymore.
Freddy Kerrest: Companies now have to operate in zero trust environments. Instead of trusting everyone behind the firewall, they could no longer trust anyone, whether behind, or outside the firewall. Companies can no longer give access to anything until they authorize who you are, and what you should have access to. The traditional workspace is a thing of the past.
Freddy Kerrest: Sure, folks are still going into the office to work, but they're working from home, they're working from cafes, they're working from transcontinental airplane flights, they're working from anywhere that Wifi is available. It's why we've seen a massive increase in the adoption of cloud applications, and mobile devices in the enterprise.
Freddy Kerrest: Employees need seamless access to corporate applications regardless of their location, and device. The challenge is that IT no longer owns the network, or the device. We need a new way to ensure secure access to data. Now, sometimes organizations think about how, 'Am I going to leave that access up to users', but that is something that they can no longer do, and why is that?
Freddy Kerrest: Well, north of 70% of all passwords are duplicates, north of 80% of all breaches are based on stolen, or weak credentials. So not surprisingly, north of 90% of all phishing attacks are focused on those same credentials. As a result, the zero trust model is becoming an increasingly commonly accepted approach to a modern enterprise security architecture. Zero trust emphasizes a few things. First of all, the need to enforce security inside the perimeter the same way you would outside the perimeter, but also encouraging least privileged access to applications.
Freddy Kerrest: All users, devices, and networks involved in accessing corporate data are continuously evaluated against this set of policies to determine what is in fact, legitimate access. The concept is essentially, trust no one until the identity, and the device posture have been proven, and validated. Nice story, Frederic. Now, how is Okta going to help us here?
Freddy Kerrest: Well, we are focused on making zero trust a reality for our customers in four ways. These are not new ways, these are the things that you've heard before. First of all, centralizing identity, and access control via a single sign on. Secondly, ensuring strong access across all services using multifactor, and adaptive multifactor authentication. Third of all, reducing the surface attack via automated provisioning, and de-provisioning of users, and fourth, providing visibility, and response to credential compromise, and account takeover attacks.
Freddy Kerrest: Our focus here has been on evolving our contextual access management feature set as you heard a lot about yesterday, and you'll hear more about later on this morning. We're moving beyond the Okta policy engine that we all know, and love, to a solution that can make adaptive access decisions based on user login patterns, and associated confidence levels.
Freddy Kerrest: We're also introducing a growing ecosystem of partners, integrations with leading security analytics vendors that enables both increased visibility, and response for both device context, and behavior detection. Okta's implementation of zero trust in that model is the first step in our much larger contextual access management vision to provide this for all of our customers, and as our contextual access management plans progress, our solution will further encompass the network security focus of zero trust with the device focus of BeyondCorp.
Freddy Kerrest: There's a new security paradigm impacting the entire security industry, and as companies shift access controls away from that network perimeter, and over to people, the security industry itself is converging around identity. MDM, UBA, firewalls, VPNs, these were all designed, and built for on-prem technologies, and corporate owned devices, which is why you're seeing an entirely new generation of modern security companies.
Freddy Kerrest: I'm very happy to say that these companies, some of the most forward-thinking security organizations in the world are all close partners of ours, and are out there on the show floor. So, I encourage you when you have a chance to go out there, and talk to them a little bit about what they're doing, and how they can help you in your organization.
Freddy Kerrest: Today, people, and identities are at the heart of the modern security stack, which is why yesterday you heard how we continue to develop new functionality to better protect people, and their data. It's also why you continue to hear us talk about our great partnerships with the leading companies in the world, whether it's VMware, SailPoint, Palo Alto Networks, ServiceNow, and on, but let's take it out of the abstract for a moment, and let's see what one of the most innovative media companies in the world, and how they are embracing this shift.
Speaker 1: 21st Century Fox is a media company. Our brands include everything from National Geographic, to Fox News, and Fox Sports ...
PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:33:04]
Melody: Our brands include everything from National Geographic to Fox News and Fox Sports to the production studios of a 20th Century film and Television. Fox is operating in 140 countries that we are delivering our content into you and then behind the scenes to make that reality possible is not only our 30,000 to approximately deep, full time employee staff, but the hundreds or thousands of partners that we work with on a day to day basis to actually create that content and to form that final product that our consumers love. Our users are brilliant producers, they're brilliant film makers, they're creatives, they're not security experts. Our main goal is how do we enable our users to thrive and to be able to work the way they want to work, which is increasingly collaborative and through digital platforms and to do so in a way that is fundamentally secure.
Freddy Kerrest: Please join me in welcoming to the stage Melody Hildebrand. Melody. Good morning. Nice to see you.
Melody: Good to see you.
Freddy Kerrest: Thanks for coming.
Melody: Of course.
Freddy Kerrest: Thanks for joining us here. So Chief Information Security Officer at 21st Century Fox, that doesn't sound like a very important job.
Melody: Well, I think what we're seeing at Fox is, well all media companies is that content is really king for us. And think about the complexity of delivering that content to consumers. For us that means live broadcast, so live sports, live news as well as large productions from film and television. And we've seen of course over the last few years really high profile incidents surrounding the theft of content as content increasingly is more valuable. So security is really paramount to how we deliver content uninterrupted to consumers but also to protect our investments. So we take an example of Deadpool Two, I know you don't watch films but anyone here see Deadpool Two?
Freddy Kerrest: I love movies but anyone with any kids under the age of five seen a movie in the last six years? Exactly. You're lying, you're all lying.
Melody: So Deadpool Two has a production budget of over a hundred million dollars, over a year of filming and post production work. A film of that complexity generally has about 200 discreet third parties, so non-Fox companies that touch the content and of course this is highly geographically disperse. So we really need to think about securing data through that entire life cycle before it gets to theaters and into the hands of consumers.
Freddy Kerrest: And that's a geographically dispersed group of 200 different companies. Obviously making a movie like Deadpool takes 12, 18, 24 months. You want to make sure that the right people have access at the right time, that you're using all sorts of different applications. It sounds like a pretty complex environment.
Melody: Yeah, we really have a philosophy which is that for the creative process, we need to deliver a best in class suite of applications to our users and our partners. So that increasingly means it's not a monolithic approach because today generally the best applications that users love are not found within a bundled app offered by a single provider. So we really needed to have an identity strategy that allowed us to break apart those bundles and to provide a coherent experience for users across these discreet types of applications and to do so fundamentally in a way that's secure. And I think by having that identity layer, which comprises that coherent experience, but also from a security perspective, allows me to have the right visibility and the right enforcement points. That is what has enabled us to think about what you alluded to during your opening remarks, which is that we don't need to give this really discrete group of users which are producers and filmmakers and composers and visual effects artists, and think about how do we grant them access to our corporate network and everything else that's there. And instead, how do we grant them access to the applications that they need under certain context. And so that's what really kind of drove us to go down this zero trust path.
Freddy Kerrest: And when you think about zero trust, how do modern technologies, obviously Okta and others, help you both provide an awesome end user experience and like you said, ensure that people can use the applications they want while at the same time, as you said, under constant threat making sure that only the right people have access to the right data. What are some of the practicalities of that?
Melody: Yep, we were set down this path really trying to solve two problems. And so the first was in the complexity of film production. So how do you deliver these really discreet types of user bases who are interacting with our crown jewels, the right tooling. And I do believe it's security's responsibility to give access to, get the technology to users that allows them to do their best work. These are brilliant creatives. They're not security experts. They shouldn't need to think every moment about the risk of a phishing attack bringing down the entire enterprise and disrupting their entire production. So how can we give them the right tooling and to enable them to have access to the applications that they love in a way that kind of reduces the blast radius of any given incident. And concretely, these are just creatives that there's no way they're going to VPN. So that's just not on the table.
Melody: And so then the second question, which is very different, is that another problem we needed to solve was around our broadcast business. So live sports, live news, this is historically an environment that is really legacy and has operated under a bit of a security through obscurity approach, which esoteric protocols. Very few people really understand broadcast end to end, that could be kind of like a warm blanket of security. But I think who could actually break into this thing? It's so incomprehensible. But that is actually kind of obviously not the modern way to think about the problem.
Freddy Kerrest: Security by obfuscation.
Melody: Exactly. But the reality is like, as much as I would love to move these technologies to the cloud tomorrow, the underlying vendor population isn't ready. So there's a reality that we have to deal with, which is how can we have a modern and secure way of delivering access to this very legacy architecture. So there are two very discrete problems that we sought to solve.
Freddy Kerrest: And you have to do that on a global basis with organizations, some of which are very, very mature, others of which are just getting ramped up. So you really have to think about how can I provide a secure environment but do that in a way where I'm kind of bringing everyone along in the franchise? Right?
Melody: Exactly, and I think the identity strategy to have Okta as our initial identity provider for single sign on and for multifactor, that was really the foundational technology that we were able to bring in to build upon as we then went down the zero trust journey. And so once we had that enforcement point and we can verify who a person was and look at their device as well, the next question was how do we enable secure access to applications assuming no VPN or network. And the way we sought to do that was to target two discreet classes of applications. One beautiful SAS, cloud, native, modern technology, something like Workday. And then the second was a gnarly required local admin to run on prem, thick client application that is essential to essentially all newsrooms. And we had to think about how to bring both of those applications into this new model.
Melody: So our approach for that was to bring them both behind a cloud DMZ to then have a secure mechanism for device and communication path between the device to those applications and then remove all the legacy mechanisms through which users were able to access them. And that proved the concept. It was possible that if we could tackle this gnarly app, anything was possible. So we've been able to move really fast on beyond corpifying our SAS, and that's the easy part. Those apps you can move really quickly. There's really no technical barrier. There's culture change, but the hard part is the legacy. And so with the legacy pieces, two things I've been really bullish on that we're experimenting with, one is app streaming. So for these thick client applications, can we instead deliver them over html and reduce or eliminate the need for users to actually locally install software. And the second is what I'm trying to pitch is kind of the VDIs that don't suck.
Freddy Kerrest: Right. That's a tagline. I just want to know if you use that, you need to give her credit. VDIs that don't suck. I just want to be clear on that.
Melody: That's my trademark and I think they exist. And so with Paperspace, Amazon Workspaces, I think these are some ways that that we can bridge the gap as we modernize the underlying technology and make them more cloud native. And what I'm most bullish about, I'm 100% convinced that this is a more secure way for the future to push security to the application layer. But I'm also really convinced that our users are going to like it better because the experience now, and film is a great example. People are working from all over the world. They're geographically dispersed. They want to collaborate with one another and they want to collaborate whether they're at JFK airport or they're at home or they're on the lot in Los Angeles. And this approach will allow us to actually have a consistent experience across all of those different ways of working. So I'm actually pretty psyched that our users are going to dig it.
Freddy Kerrest: Love to hear it. Well, join me in thanking very much Melody for her time today.
Melody: Thanks you.
Freddy Kerrest: Thanks, Melody. Well if we think that security has changed a lot recently, what can we say about the customer experience? Let's take a stroll down memory lane to see how the customer experience has matured a little bit over the last 30 years. From the days of bring your own books at the Scholastic book fair to mail order subscriptions for a dollar, the introduction of electronic commerce, groceries delivered to your door at least the alpha version, and if groceries certainly we can deliver DVDs, personalized ringtones you all had them, didn't you? That's right, personalized ringtone so that people would notice when someone was calling you, which clearly was very important because ringtones were 10% of the global music market at that time. I know you had them.
Freddy Kerrest: Two day shipping becomes a thing, because why wait patiently for three days? The advent of the smartphone just 10 years ago which obviously led to products like Uber and Lyft. Why go outside and hail a cab in the rain when you could do that by just pressing a button on your phone and watching the car appear, which is a pretty magical experience. Connected devices to confirm that you slept poorly last night, which you of course already knew. That's right, that's the only thing connected devices are good for. Paying with your mobile phone, which I know you set up to be cool, but you still take out your wallet every time at the check stand because you can't figure out how your phone works. And then finally not even going to the store or answering the door, just having the goods dropped off in your backyard. Wow, all right. There's the drone fan over there. I like it. Perfect.
Freddy Kerrest: Everyone wants these unique, personalized, customized, exciting, profitable experience for their customers. The challenge of course, is that all of these new experiences required developers. Developers are in short supply. They're less than 25 million developers in the world and about 1 million developers in the United States. Now to put that in context, there are three and a half million truck drivers in North America. So in this great land of innovation of ours, there are over three times as many truck drivers as there are software developers. And now why does this matter? It matters because there is no way that you should be spending your precious scarce developer resources building ancillary software that is not core to your business, software that exists as a service and that provides no sustainable competitive differentiation to you and your company in the market.
Freddy Kerrest: That's why we've seen such an increase, for example, in Office 365 and G Suite around the world because folks cannot, nor can they afford to have their precious developers spending any time on exchange servers anymore. And with your precious developers in today's growth environment, you need to build for scale. And to do that, you need to think about microservices and APIs. It's great to reduce the cost and enhance the security posture, but this is about growth and it's about the future of your business. In today's capital environment, if you are not growing, you're dying. And if you are not building awesome customer experiences, I guarantee you that your competitors are, which means that they're taking your customers and your revenue with it.
Freddy Kerrest: Now once you built for scale, you can focus entirely on the experience. You can bring in innovative technologies and trends like biometric, machine learning and artificial intelligence to make the experience for your customers, your travelers, your patients as immersive as possible. But be honest and raise your hand if you could come up here right now today and talk to me on stage about your artificial intelligence and your machine learning strategy. Yeah, one person right here. Do you want to come on? No, okay. Not many of you, right? That's why. It's because you're focused on the forest. You're focused on the day to day. You don't have the opportunity and the luxury to be focused, I'm sorry you're focused on the trees. You don't have the luxury to be focused on the forest. You're focused on scale when you should focus in fact on experience. Let's hear from a chief technology and digital officer, a large company today about how he is navigating this very balance.
Eash: JetBlue is a New York hometown airline. Since our start, we fly over 100 destinations, 40 million customers, 250 aircraft, and we've been growing successfully. Innovation is in jetBlue's DNA since our founding days. Our digital strategy absolutely enables our customer experience strategy. As a chief digital officer for jetBlue, I'm responsible for providing that frictionless, seamless travel experience for our customers using technology. Technology enables a personal, helpful and a simple travel experience. Our crew members need to have meaningful interactions with our customers and that can be provided by a great culture or a technology tool that enables that interaction to be meaningful. Safety and security of this airline is our number one priority. Everything in the aviation industry starts with who you are and what you do, and identity is key to the success of this airline to keep us safe and secure.
Freddy Kerrest: So please join me in welcoming Eash Sundaram to the stage, Eash. Nice to see you.
Eash: Good to see you, man.
Freddy Kerrest: Good morning.
Eash: Good morning, everyone.
Freddy Kerrest: Come on, you guys can do better than for Eash. All right. I don't even get a welcome reception like that. It's hard.
Eash: Because a lot of them are customers.
Freddy Kerrest: That's right.
Eash: They love jetBlue.
Freddy Kerrest: It's like you and President Obama and then the rest of us. All right, so tell us a little about jetBlue and in particular about chief technology and chief digital officer at the same time, which is pretty novel certainly from what I've seen and why that makes sense and how you think about that.
Eash: Hey Freddy, first of all, thanks for the opportunity to share our story here and the first thing we always start is by a thank you to all our partners in here. Many of you actually work with us and keep us safe and secure and we have plenty of customers who help us day in and day out. So thank you, thank you for keeping us safe and secure. When you think about Jack Lewis' vision, it's inspiring humanity. Not many publicly traded companies actually have a vision statement, inspire humanity. Everything we look at through organizational design, we look at a personal helpful, simple strategy whether it's serving our customers or serving our crew members. Our org design pretty much collapsed a lot of functions that used to be under different organizations and a lot of handoffs, touchpoints, just not efficient. When you look at digital technology and/or new venture capital, they have so many synergies, reduce time to market, cost to deliver and absolutely the best quality systems that we need to deploy to run our company. So it's helping us a lot when you start thinking through the lens of being a company that absolutely focuses on inspiring humanity.
Freddy Kerrest: And what not everyone in the room might know is the global footprint of jetBlue. So certainly when I think about that, I think about digital as certainly an enabling function for that.
Eash: Yeah, jetBlue flight to many countries in North, South and Central America and Caribbean. But if you look at our technology organization, it's almost every part of the world. Our e-commerce runs out of Dublin. We have flight systems that's built in Krakow, Poland and Croatia, a large development shop in India and Manila. Pretty much everything is global for us, although we haven't started flying to that part of the world yet.
Freddy Kerrest: Got it.
Eash: I use the word yet.
Freddy Kerrest: Yes, I got that.
Eash: It's coming soon.
Freddy Kerrest: Obviously you talked a little about security. You talked about it a little bit in the video as well, security and biometrics. How do you think about, as you're trying to modernize not only the employee and the pilot experience but also the customer experience? What is your take on security biometrics and how you're ensuring that what you're building now is also going to be future proofing your environment as you go forward?
Eash: Right, wen you think about jetBlue's customer experience strategy, we use the word personal, helpful, simple. We always talk about how we want to get a transitional airport experience, not a transactional airport experience. In the past, most airlines looked at self service as passing your problems to your customers and actually asking you to do it. We took a very different approach of saying if a transaction doesn't need to be there, let's eliminate them. If we cannot eliminate them, let's automate them. When you look at everything we do such as auto check in, self service strategy, biometrics has emerged as the number one priority for us. It starts with identifying yourself, right? And once you identify yourselves, everything from personalization to safety, security, just the ease of transaction, it's just fascinating to see how many steps you eliminate in the process to have a frictionless travel experience.
Eash: We've been partnering with our partners in CPB and TSA. When President Obama talked about government and how difficult sometimes it may be, with CPB and TSA it's been a delight to work with them. Actually they are very modern in their thinking and we've been launching our biometrics effort in a couple of gates and I think that's the future for us.
Freddy Kerrest: That's great. And I know that you also, thank you for the partnership with Okta, but we also talked yesterday on stage about our new partnership with VMware. I know that you have been leveraging both of the technologies for awhile. How might that play into your environment and how might that help you move your initiatives forward?
Eash: Yeah, it's funny, I always say jetBlue has been on the cloud since day one so we don't need to modernize much. Right? But our partners, VMC Dell, we have such a fantastic relationship with our partners in general, but there's some partners who we call them friends, like you guys are.
Freddy Kerrest: Thank you.
Eash: We absolutely believe in one thing. Technology is something you can buy. You can find people to do technology, but you can't find friends to work with. When we pick and choose, jetBlue is unique in its culture. Things like inspiring humanity is not something every company thinks day in and day out. Right? When it's hurricane in Puerto Rico, we have our partners working with us to help our customers and crew members in that region. Every single time we look at things beyond just technology and product, we look at a company in total and we love you guys. You've been friends for us for a long time and we enjoy the relationship.
Freddy Kerrest: I appreciate that. Thank you very much, likewise. So finally I've heard you talk a lot about the next generation of customer experience. It's something that you're always thinking about. Today we're doing something, but here's how I want it to work tomorrow. How do you think about, to give some tips to the folks in the audience, they're thinking about how they're going to modernize their customer experience, what are some of the frameworks or some of the tips and tricks that you might have to share for what you're doing at jetBlue?
Eash: Yeah, we look at it through the lens of future proofing jetBlue first. This is an industry, 104 years of commercial flying January 1st, 1914 when Tony Janis flew the first flight. Since 104 years, this industry has collectively lost $38 billion. Mergers, bankruptcies that's what we've seen. So when you think about jetBlue as a company, we look at future-proofing through the lens of customer experience, through the lens of our culture. JetBlue technology ventures is a wholly owned subsidiary of jetBlue which is a Silicon Valley based venture capital firm. But what we look at is how the next generation of jetBlue would shape both disrupting internally the way we do business and also expanding that scope of jetBlue beyond an airline. We want to be in the travel hospitality space, so we have invested in companies with on demand hotels, electric aircraft to disrupt regional travel. I strongly believe one thing you need to have great people to run the company. Great people, you have then great culture. And companies are built on culture and that's built on people. And the other thing we look at through is in a highly, highly complex regulated industry, try to bring in simplicity.
Freddy Kerrest: Yup.
Eash: Right? Everything we do with you guys especially, it's all about simplicity. The layers of security and the processes we had to now, it's just you come in and we know who you are, you know you're secure, take it and personalize it. That's what we are looking at.
Freddy Kerrest: Perfect. Great. Well fantastic. Eash, please join me in thanking very much Eash for his time this morning. Fantastic. Well we heard this morning from some of our forward thinking customers, very exciting conversations out here. I'm now going to turn it over to some of our product leadership to talk to you a little bit about the product roadmap, what we have coming up ahead, what you can expect from us and how you can think about that and your roadmaps. Thank you.
Alex: That's a great intro. All right, good morning everybody. I'm Alex Salazar and this is Rich Dandliker. And for the next 20 minutes we're going to walk you through our product vision and our roadmap for the next few years. And our hope is that by the end of this, you're as excited as we are about where we're taking Okta and you'll consider new ways of working with us as customers and as partners. So let's get started with the product vision.
Alex: So let's say you made a big investment in a new HR system. You want to get the most out of that system so you plug it into Okta. So now when someone joins, moves or leaves your organization, those changes are reflected in your identity system and in turn the downstream applications. But chances are, that HR system is just one of a growing number of cloud applications like Box and Service Now and you want to manage access to those as well. So you also plug them into Okta to secure them through single sign on, multifactor authentication and user provisioning. But for the apps that matter most, we can interact with their unique business logic. In Box, when we create a user, we can also create folders and assign folders. And when that user leaves your organization, we can make sure that that folder is being reassigned to a coworker or their manager so the content isn't lost. In Service Now, we can plug in and create service tickets, boosting your onboarding flows. So that same user can now get a desk, a phone, and a set of manager approvals.
Alex: But you also have on-prem systems like SAP and there are two we can plug into a proxy like at five and ensure that that legacy implementation has a modern, single sign on experience with modern, mobile MFA for a system deployed before smartphones. And throughout all of this, we're collecting a ton of data and we can funnel it all into a service like Splunk to give you and your security teams a broader view of what's happening inside your organization.
Alex: But you're not stopping there. You're also taking your products and services online. You're building custom mobile applications, web applications, and new APIs. And for all of these, you want to ensure that you have great secure customer experiences. So you also plug them into Okta, giving you out of the box authentication authorization and user management, reducing your costs of development, speed to market, improving security. This is our vision. One platform, two sets of products and one really big ambition to help you manage, integrate and secure all your resources with one powerful identity service.
Alex: And so to realize his vision over the next few years we're making investments in four key areas. The first is our Okta integration network, our ecosystem of partners and integrations, then our core identity products for employees, our security products and our API products for customer identity. So throughout Oktane this week you've probably heard a lot about our integration network. Our ecosystem of partners and integration, they're central to our strategy, and that ecosystem is strong. It's 5,500 integrations and growing rapidly. And as we look for ways to level up, we're looking to grab the integrations that matter most to our customers and deepen those integrations. And there are three categories we're going to be focusing on over the next few years. One, our HR systems, the other one is cloud infrastructure services and then finally customer identity. For HR systems, these are really important. It allows us to do something really exciting. When someone joins moves or leaves your organization, we can automatically create accounts and downstream systems, remove them and downstream systems, change their entitlements. This is powerful. And as we look to be even more successful with these system integrations than we are today, we're investing in supporting more scale, hundreds of thousands of employees and in some cases over a million.
Alex: But with that increased scale also comes increased complexity. So we're also looking support organizations that have high rates of change in their employee base. And in some cases organizations want to customize our standard workflows. So we want to give them the ability to either customize our out of the box workflows or in some cases create their own custom workflows. And we also want to broaden the base of our integrations, not just the cloud systems like Workday and Namely, but also on-prem systems like Oracle.
Alex: Now moving over to cloud infrastructure, everyone in this room is making a transition to the cloud and to these services, AWS, Azure, GCP, and we want to have a best in class integration for these vendors to help you transition with a vendor neutral partner and that means a few investments. One investment is also increased scale and complexity. Managing AWS or Azure with a dozen admins is a materially different problem statement than managing it with over a hundred and we want to give you the workflows and the tools to support either end of that spectrum. In addition, each of these vendors themselves have dozens of sub-services. AWS has EC2, S3, Red Shift and dozens of other services. As we're making best-in-class integrations to these partners, we're also looking at all the sub-services and finding ways of building more depth for each of them as well.
Alex: Now customer identity is really exciting. We'll talk a bit more about it later. But there too, we want to replicate the success we've had in the ecosystem for IT products, want to replicate it as well for our customer identity products and that means integrations like CRM. So when a user registers for your mobile application, we can push that user record into something like Salesforce or another CRM. Integrations to things like Experian for identity proofing to ensure that that user in your healthcare application is who they say they are. Or integrations to Engine X to give your developers out of the box integrations to the tools they're already using to build a modern application.
Alex: But beyond depth of integration, we're also looking to allow the community to contribute more to a growing ecosystem and that means lowering the bar for integrations. So for software vendors today who are integrating with us for single sign on or for provisioning, we want to give them better toolkits, better documentation, make it cheaper and faster to integrate with us. But in addition, our portfolio is rapidly expanding and we want to allow our integration partners to also expand with us. So we want to give them more features, more APIs, more functionality so they can create more integrations, more creative solutions for you.
Alex: But we're also seeing a lot of demand from other people who want to build alternatives to the integrations we already have. We have a great integration with Salesforce, but people who are not Salesforce or Okta might want to build a different kind of Salesforce integration for slightly different use cases. Maybe it's a global integrator, maybe it's a customer or maybe it's another software vendor, we want to allow them to submit it and expose it back to you as a customer to give you the power of choice.
Alex: Now to make our ecosystem and our integration network powerful, we need to have great products and so up next is Rich to talk about the investments we're making in core identity and security. Now Rich is a little nervous, so please give him a warm welcome.
Rich: Thanks, Alex. I admit I am a little nervous and thank you, Alex, for keeping that just between us and our few close friends here.
Alex: My pleasure.
Rich: I also tend to go through the worst case scenario in my mind and I think, what if I got up here and just fainted flat on my face and President Obama was still here in the audience and he decided to come up here and try to resuscitate me? Trust me, that's not how I want to make it onto the company Twitter feed. I do want to make it on by telling you about our core identity strategy at Okta. And it starts with a great customer experience that really convinces our customers to use our products and then continue to use them even more. We also believe that solutions for managing employee life cycles have been around for years, but solutions for collaborators from outside of the organization haven't kept up and we can do that better.
Rich: We also believe that shiny new things always have to coexist with legacy infrastructure as customers modernize. Our product strategy is to build in both directions, both for the emerging technologies and the older installed systems. Last, we believe that the trend towards dev ops and dev sec ops is a growing one and will become the reality. We want to better enable dysfunctional model for IT.
Rich: So this is our strategy, these are the pillars. What are we actually building in terms of functionality to support this? It starts with universal directory, the foundational layer for all our products. We're starting by looking to build better, different relationships between the optics we store and more metadata about those objects.
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Rich: ... between the objects we store and more than metadata about those objects. This includes things like a more sophisticated treatment of managerial relationships, device relationships for device trust and IoT use cases as well as enabling distributed group management for owners outside of IT. We're also investing in better security and compliance. Features like sensitive attribute protection that allow you to securely store credit card and social security numbers. You can lock these down so that only certain admins can get access to view or export that data and you get a full granular audit log. Not only that, but because it's Okta, we're doing it the right way. We're encrypting it at the data layer. So it's the same whether you access via APIs or through the admin interface.
Rich: We're also looking to expand our geographical footprint by adding a cell in Asia to support performance and compliance requirements of customers there. We're looking to make universal directory more flexible and powerful by adding things like enumerated attributes, like role names that define permissions and downstream applications. We're also looking to lift restrictions. For instance, always requiring your first name and last name or supporting a username that might not be in the format of an email address. We also recognize that customer identities often live in existing systems like a database. We want to look for new ways to progressively pull those identities into Okta without requiring a big bang data migration or password reset.
Rich: We also want to build more better and better solutions for automation of the lifecycle of users in Okta. And that starts with the next version of self-service registration. We'll add features like the ability to do more data validation of email addresses to whitelist and blacklist certain domains of new registrants. We also want to enable more ways to add in custom flows with web hooks and callbacks, for instance, out through a third party identity proofing service or to see if a new registrant actually matches an existing customer record.
Rich: We're also looking to build more automation around system notifications of upcoming scheduled events. For example, a manager could get advanced notification if a contractor on their team is going to get their account suspended. We also want to make sure that we build automated account cleanup for incomplete registrations.
Rich: Last, we're going forward and continuing to push on our integration with HR systems as the master system of record for the enterprise. But we're going back to the future. We've always been great for cloud-based HR like Workday where we find a lot of customers have on-premise systems like Oracle. We think that being able to integrate with tools like CSV extract is a great integration point for systems like these.
Rich: So now, I'd like to pivot a little bit and tell you about the key parts of our security strategy. And it starts with the idea of zero trust. It's really about building in a security layer at the identity and device points, not at the network perimeter. We think increasingly this is the right architectural model for modern IT. We also know that we want to make security built in, not an add on. Great security also has a great end user experience because as we all know, the rate of mandatory password changes directly correlates with the number of passwords written on post-it notes.
Rich: We also want to bring more and more data to bear and adaptive and machine learning tools to make that data relevant. But along with that, comes a corresponding need for an easier management model to get through the complexity.
Rich: Last, we think that one of the most rapidly increasing sources of risk is exposure through APIs. Just as all companies have started building applications, we believe the same is true of building APIs and we want to make sure we have a great security layer deeply tied to the identity layer to solve these problems. You heard about it from Joe at the demo yesterday about this traditional tradeoff between end user security, end user compliance, excuse me, user experience and security that you only get one or the other, but not both.
Rich: There are two key product initiatives that are changing that calculus. The first is the move away from active signals. Those things that require an end user to actually take action like entering a password or six digit code from the key fob. We're building more passive signals. You heard Todd talk about Okta threat insight. Other great examples of this are device trust, detecting impossible travel and other behavioral rules.
Rich: In addition to just being a better end user experience, these factors can also be assessed programmatically behind the scenes because they don't require an end user, so you can do the more often. This gets you towards continuous authentication. So these two things, more passive signals, assessing them more often gets you to that nirvana of security, a better end user experience and better security.
Rich: We saw that we're adding more signals, that increases complexity, especially if you're trying to manage it in the traditional declarative if this then that kind of policy structure. We're moving towards a risk-based model that abstracts it and simplifies it all down to one single parameter. You'll still get the ability to define weightings for different rules, to really make it work for your environment and situation, and we know that you'll always need to get down to the granular level, to see the rules that fire. When your CEO gets access to her email block, you've got to be able to provide a route for troubleshooting.
Rich: The emerging access model is applications and devices going through APIs to resources. That's exactly why we designed API access management. We've recently added the ability to do OAuth consent. This allows a third party developer that's building against your APIs to actually ask individual end users their permission to use their data. This dramatically increases the potential ecosystem of apps that are built on top of your APIs without sacrificing security and compliance. We're also adding in the ability to see previews of tokens, to see the scopes and claims for accurate policy formulation and troubleshooting.
Rich: Last, we're expanding out our support for different OAuth standards that are needed by specific industry verticals, like healthcare and financial services. So with that, I'm going to hand it back over to Alex to tell you a little bit more about some of the other things that are coming in our API promise.
Alex: Thank you, Rich. So we're winning in customer identity. And in part because we have an unfair advantage. We can take everything rich just talked about and we can expose the underlying the Lego blocks that make those work back out to you and your developers as APIs that you can assemble in any way you need to hit your requirements.
Alex: And as we look forward in our API products, we're focusing in three areas. The first is helping you deliver better customer experiences with out of the box workflows. The second is helping you get the most out of your developers because they're scarce. And then last is helping you deliver best in class security in your applications, even if you don't have the expertise in-house.
Alex: So earlier, you heard each from JetBlue talk about the importance of identity in customer experience. Well, today, most organizations are custom-building all of that into their applications logic, all custom, all from scratch, that's expensive to build and maintain. But many of you in this room today are already using Okta and that's helping you separate out your core business logic, what matters most from your identity and security logic. And we're giving you out of these out of the box workflows like registration, authentication, password recovery.
Alex: And our focus over the next few years is to give you more of those workflows but also give you those workflows with more choice, more ways of deploying them. So in some cases where you don't need a lot of customization, your developers can implement a reg flow or an auth flow with very little to no code by just redirecting to a set of pages that Okta is managing and securing for you and your branding. If you want more control, you can take one of our JavaScript widgets and just drop it into your application. Or if you want ultimate control, you can drop down to the raw rest APIs and your developers can assemble them in any way they need to hit the requirements.
Alex: But at the heart of our API product strategy are developers. You heard Freddy talk about earlier how no one has enough developers, and the few developers you have are spread thin. Well, we are putting a lot of R&D into helping you get the most out of your developers when working with Okta. And one place is around developer tooling. Better SDKs, better framework integrations, awesome documentation. In addition, we talk a lot about giving developers these out of the box Lego blocks that they can use. But in some cases, the developers want the Lego block to do something slightly different than what we built. And so, we want to give the developer the authority, the power to break down that Lego block into smaller components that they can reassemble as needed and maybe insert some of their own components to hit their requirements.
Alex: In combination with that, we also want to make our service more extensible, so there are a lot of events flowing through Okta, authentication events, user creation, tremendous amounts of data to being changed for users. On any of these events, we want a developer to be able to call a web hook or a call back to their own custom logic, which combined with granular APIs give them near infinite customizability for their workflows.
Alex: But the biggest value proposition we're going to deliver on is getting your developers out of the business of security. Most developers don't learn security in school, and even fewer get on-the-job training, and yet all of them are building security layers for mobile and web applications and APIs. We want to put an end to that, and now we're doing a lot around that, but I'll give you one example, and that example is authentication.
Alex: Your requirements are changing every day around authentication. We started with passwords, then SMS, then push, and now biometrics. But if you have a developer trying to implement these requirements in an application, instead of her going in and becoming an expert in any one of these factors to implement it in your custom application, we want to be her Swiss army knife. So if she needs biometrics one day or if she needs SMS one time passwords another day, she can just call an Okta API and deliver it in a few minutes.
Alex: More importantly, when their requirements change after the applications in production, instead of having to pull her off another project to go crack open source code and make the requirements change and then push it out through your custom deployment process, we can actually have a non-developer go into the Okta console and through a web interface just change configuration without having to redeploy software. That's powerful. That's the value of what we're building in our API products.
Alex: Now, we've talked about our IT products for employees. We've talked about our API products for customers. I'm going to let Rich close out here and talk about how we're thinking about the product beyond the next few years.
Rich: Thanks Alex. And in that theme of going beyond, I wanted to talk a little bit about signing with Okta and more broadly business authentication. And you heard about this from Todd, well I want to give you some insight into why we're talking about it, why we're investing in it and why I'm so excited about it.
Rich: Okta started our journey by providing a foundation for secure access for employees. As we evolved, we added that same foundation for partners and customers. As we go forward, we believe there's value in providing a foundation for secure access for everyone. Okta is uniquely positioned to do this because of the network effects on top of the scale of the ecosystem that we've already been able to build across millions of users and thousands of software companies. And we're Okta, so we're tightly aligned to the value that we're delivering to end users. We're not trying to sell customer data or lock customers into a particular ecosystem of applications or operating systems.
Rich: So what is that value to end users? You could imagine extending the concept of the lifecycle of secure access beyond the relationship with a particular organization. Before you join a company, you might need to fill out a job application or securely sign an employment agreement. Once you join that company, you'll need continued access to those same applications because it becomes part of the enterprise suite. After you leave the company, you might need continued access for some of those apps you had as an employee. For instance, you want to access your brokerage account to get to your 401k or your health benefits because now you're enrolled in [Cobra 01:18:40].
Rich: We see a future where Okta is the foundation for secure access for everyone is unified across all the different business relationships over your entire career but outlives any single business relationship. That's our vision for business authentication and that's why I'm so excited about it. On behalf of me and Alex, I'd like to thank you for your time and please keep your seats, our chief customer officer is up next.
Speaker 3: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Okta's chief customer officer, Krista Anderson-Copperman.
Patty Morrison: I love that song. I really do. Well that was great. That was great information from Rich and Alex. Thank you everyone. If the future of Okta is to become the foundation for secure access for everything, it's our job in the customer first organization to make that happen, to make that a reality. And the way that we think about that is really in four key steps. The first one is all about learning. So you guys have spent the past two days here at Oktane taking in all of the great information, all the roadmap information, the capabilities that we have been and will continue to roll out. Sorry, I just had a massive coughing attack before I came on here.
Patty Morrison: And outside of Oktane, there are plenty of other opportunities for you to take advantage of that information. So we certainly have instructor led courses, we have online courses and then we have our path to certification. If any of you have been paying attention during the breaks between keynotes, there has been a rolling list of names and those are the hundreds of customers and partners who've actually gone down this path and who've gotten certified and understand Okta at a very deep level. So that's the first piece. Understanding what it is that Okta can do and how we can apply it to your organization.
Patty Morrison: The second component is all about deploying. It's about getting you guys up and running as quickly as possible. For those of you who've been to octane a few times, you know that every time I get up here, I talk about getting you live quickly and how that is our first priority. And that is and will remain to be our first priority. But we want to do that in a way where we future-proof your architecture, where we design it in a way that you can do more with Okta. And when you come to future Oktanes and you understand those additional capabilities, it's very easy for you to take advantage of that and make that happen and make it real in your environments.
Patty Morrison: Once we do that, it's all about adoption. Making sure that you guys are actually using what it is you purchased, and more important or equally as important, I should say, making sure that you're getting value out of it. You chose Okta in the sales cycle for a very particular reason, to solve a business problem, to deliver value and that's what's most important to us. In the customer first organization, that is why we are here, that's what we're metricked on, to make sure that you are getting value out of your purchase with Okta.
Patty Morrison: And then once we do that, it's all about growing. If we did these things, if we educate you, we got you up and running quickly, we future-proofed your architecture, then it's about what's next. So coming to events like Oktane, engaging with your CSM, getting those services folks onsite to help you understand what else you can do and what additional problems you can solve, all about growth. And when I think about our most successful customers, those are customers who've gone through this cycle with us a couple of times.
Patty Morrison: And one of the customers that comes to mind is Splunk, which is why I'm thrilled to ask Declan Morris, the CIO of Splunk to join me on stage today. Thank you.
Declan Morris: Thank you very much indeed.
Patty Morrison: Yeah. So, for those of you who aren't feeling well today, not because of a hangover, maybe you got a little cold, I would like to introduce patient zero.
Declan Morris: Yes, I am patient zero. It's great, the cold that keeps on giving. So, if any of you seed some time off later on, just stop by.
Patty Morrison: All right. So most of you in the audience are familiar with Splunk and what Splunk does. But Declan, why don't you tell us a little bit about Splunk's journey with Okta?
Declan Morris: Yeah, for sure. So we've been an Okta customer for a number of years. Just to give the folks context, in terms of global employees, we're at over 3000. We have over 15,000 customers in 110 countries. So, as I said a number of years ago, we became an Okta customer focused primarily on single sign on and MFA. And that's been a terrific experience for us. Okta really is the window into all of the enterprise apps. It's where we send our employees. They know where to go, it's fantastic.
Declan Morris: The challenge that we have is on external identity. For external identity, I think a lot of you can relate to this, number of siloed properties that you actually offer up to your customers. In our case, over 20. And as a result, customer identity gets fragmented and there's no authoritative source. So, we were in the process of actually going down a certain technology, and it was because of Oktane last year, and I suppose of you Todd, talking about all the investments that you're doing in external identity, we actually tapped the brakes and decided we need to revisit this because it's pretty clear from your mission and vision that you're out to solve that problem.
Patty Morrison: Good. So you first learned about that at Oktane, and then what did you guys do to help bring the team along?
Declan Morris: Yeah, so, the first thing we did was actually engaged with the PS organization, which is critical. So, that's the number one thing. From the outset, engaged with the PS organization. They helped us define the use cases, get them buttoned down. There's nothing worse if you don't get that squared away.
Declan Morris: But in addition to that, they made sure to start to train the developers so they understand the benefit that they're going to get from the external identity solution. And just to be really clear, identity at the external level is a little bit more complex. It's not what you traditionally think of your customer just simply logging in. In the case of Splunk Cloud, we're enabling you the customer to actually manage the identities of your employees. So it's at another level, and because of that, it actually makes it totally transparent. So PS super, super important.
Declan Morris: And then it goes without saying, Okta Essentials, actually at the conference. And then for me personally, what's really critical is understanding the vision that Okta actually has. And these sessions are so critical to understand where you're actually making those investments, and we learn so much from that.
Patty Morrison: Good. Good. And when you think about deployments, so it sounds like you've used Okta professional services for both of those, what does success look like? So success internally and then externally with your customer?
Declan Morris: Yeah. So I think it was really key for everybody to understand that, you know, on one measure, sunsetting over 20 customer identities is a very clear cut measure. But it's more than that. Success is actually about enabling our own internal developer community to basically offload so much of the stuff that they actually carry today and focus on actually this Splunk solutions in the market. And not about building identity. And also around security as well. This is really, really key. Simplicity and security got to go hand in hand. So that's how we think about success, sunsetting, and it turns out it's a great experience for our customers.
Patty Morrison: And in terms of adoption, was that a challenge on internal or external?
Declan Morris: So, internally, it's a no brainer. In some respects, Okta is kind of melted into the background in a good way. So it's one of those things they describe as a window, you don't actually see the window frame, you actually see the view, and that's what happens internally. For the work that we're doing externally, the key thing here is to ensure that the developers are brought up to speed, continual ongoing education. And once we get there, because we're in the middle of this journey, leveraging things such as lifecycle management, universal directory, API access, it's just going to work out fantastic.
Patty Morrison: Great. Good.
Declan Morris: All right.
Patty Morrison: Well, what final advice do you have for the audience here who's looking to go on this journey with us their first or even their second or third time?
Declan Morris: Yeah, I mean, the key thing seriously is, this particular Oktane session, the annual event is just super critical to understand what are the key capabilities that Okta is bringing to market, but also understand the vision. And then really for the staff, for the developers, for the engineers, Okta Essentials is critical. And we've been a premier plus customer for quite some time and that also is key to be able to leverage that because you're going to have to do that at some point in time.
Patty Morrison: Good.
Declan Morris: Okay.
Patty Morrison: All right. Well thank you, Declan. Thanks for joining us.
Declan Morris: Thank you.
Patty Morrison: All right. So if any of you have any questions about that, just go out to the expo hall, talk to the customer first organization and they can help you. So with that, I want to welcome Frederick back on stage.
Freddy Kerrest: Wow, the room's really filled in. I guess they knew that Krista was going to be talking afterwards. I'll have to remember that, she might be starting next year. Okay. Thank you very much Krista and Declan, it's great to hear a little bit about how we're innovating with customer journeys and to hear that firsthand obviously from Declan Morris.
Freddy Kerrest: You've heard a little bit this morning about how we think about identity and how we're evolving identity, but also how we're doing that with all of you. You've heard about some of the most important trends that we see happening in our customer base. You've heard from some forward-thinking customers, we've talked to you a little bit about the roadmap and you've heard about how we're innovating around the customer journey.
Freddy Kerrest: Now, imagine what we can do when we take this innovation, this technology, everything that you're doing to move organizations forward and we bring that into our communities. That's why I am personally passionate about the work that we do with Okta for good when we can take and combine and connect people, technology and communities to positively impact the places where we work and we live.
Freddy Kerrest: So, before we hear more from the Okta for Good team about what's happened over the last year, the growth that we've seen in the program, how we've invested our resources and what we see coming up ahead, let's talk a little bit and see about how we think about impact, whether that's the impact of one person, one piece of technology or one organization.
Speaker 4: What does good look? A needle and thread? An opportunity? A bottle of water? Can it be personal? Can one action inspire something bigger? Can good be as simple as an open door? Can it create a future leader? Transform a community? Can the right technology eliminate barriers to do more good? Can it offer relief? Can it help someone in need? To us, the answer is yes, yes, yes. To us, good doesn't have to be a grand gesture. It can be small, easy, and it can change an entire day, a whole perspective, a life. Good might not take a lot but it gives and gives and gives.
Speaker 3: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome executive director of Okta for Good, Erin Baudo Felter.
Erin Baudo F.: There are three stories that inspired us this year. We like to talk about big things on the stage as you know, but honestly, it's been the people and the small moments that really stuck with us the most. And the incredible organizations that we get to work with as customers and as partners. which serves as a home away from home for families and children of tomorrow and places them at internships at companies like ours. Or Direct Relief, a medical relief nonprofit that helps survivors of poverty and disaster here in the US and around the world.
Erin Baudo F.: These are just three partners of hundreds more. We think a lot about what impact means with Okta for Good and how we can support those who are doing the most important work in the world. Our success as a business is grounded in our ecosystem, and our philanthropic strategy mirrors this. We're leveraging our team and our product to have a positive impact on the community, and we're investing not only in nonprofits but in the ecosystem that makes them successful, from funding to resourcing, employee expertise, partnerships, and more.
Erin Baudo F.: We're still early in this work but we've learned a lot over the last year. We took a big step in focusing our impact by launching the Okta for Food fund onstage at Oktane 17 and announcing NetHope as our first grantee. As a founding partner for NetHope's Center for the Digital Nonprofit, we committed to helping large scale NGOs with their most critical technology challenges. And here's why that matters. NetHope's membership of 56 nonprofits delivers 60% of the world's humanitarian aid, 60%. So we know that even small improvements in their use of technology can have a truly massive impact on the world.
Erin Baudo F.: But large NGOs are not the only organizations with critical technology needs. We've gotten to know a new nonprofit ecosystem over the last year, a community of tech nonprofits, organizations that are startups as much as they are nonprofits. These are social entrepreneurs that are bringing new thinking and new solutions to solve social challenges, and they need help too, which is why today, I'm proud to announce the next grant out of the Okta for Good fund is going to Fast Forward, an organization working at the intersection of tech nonprofits and the technology community. Please join me in welcoming Fast Forwards co-founders, Shannon Farley and Kevin Barenblat to the stage. Hey guys.
Shannon Farley: Hi.
Erin Baudo F.: Welcome to Oktane.
Shannon Farley: Thank you.
Erin Baudo F.: So, you essentially defined a brand new category, tech nonprofits. Tell us what are tech nonprofits and why focus on them?
Kevin Barenblat: Well, Erin, I started my career in for-profit tech, and when I went looking to give back, I was surprised how few nonprofits leverage technology to scale their social impact. I wanted to see more Khan Academys, more Wikipedias, more nonprofits building tech to solve social problems. So we started Fast Forward to support these entrepreneurs who are doing everything hard about a tech startup and everything hard about a nonprofit at the same time.
Erin Baudo F.: That's great. I think probably a lot of people in the room can relate to your story being a technologist and wanting to give back and not necessarily knowing how. Shannon, shifting gears a little bit, tell us about some of the momentum that you've seen with Fast Forward and where you guys are headed?
Shannon Farley: Sure. Our successful accelerator program has served 31 tech nonprofits, and last year, they served 35 million people around the world and raised 56 million in follow-on funding. But it's really just the beginning and this is where Okta is stepping in. We're building tools for the tech community, all of you to get engaged with tech nonprofits. We're scaling to serve social entrepreneurs in the US and around the world.
Erin Baudo F.: Great. And tell us a little bit more about these social entrepreneurs. Who are they and what kinds of problems are they solving?
Shannon Farley: Sure. Our social entrepreneurs are tech people who have lived experience with the problem. Take Michelle Brown. Michelle Brown was a reading teacher in rural Mississippi. And when she walked into her classroom on the first day, she had over 50 kids and about a dozen reading levels and no books. So Michelle created the platform she wished she had, a comprehensive digital reading curriculum. Now, CommonLit started a year and a half ago, and today, they're serving nearly five million users in the US and Mexico.
Kevin Barenblat: And these entrepreneurs' personal experience with the problem combined with the power of scalable technology means we're accelerating new models for impact.
Shannon Farley: Yeah.
Erin Baudo F.: Awesome. Well we could not be more excited to be embarking on this partnership with you both. So thank you, thank you so much.
Shannon Farley: Thank you.
Kevin Barenblat: Thank you.
Erin Baudo F.: So, you know, one of the themes we heard in Shannon and Kevin's comments and something that we've seen with Okta for Good a lot over the last year is this idea of the power of individuals to spark change in their organizations and their communities. Leveraging technology to drive impact at scale is critical, but we all know that the most meaningful change starts not with technology but with people.
Erin Baudo F.: Today, over lunch, we'll introduce you to three change makers, social entrepreneurs whose identities are rooted in a lifetime commitment to driving positive change for their communities. We hope you'll join us for that.
Erin Baudo F.: And now, I'm excited to introduce another individual who's driving change at a global scale. Scott Harrison is founder and CEO of Charity Water. He leads the organization on its mission to provide clean drinking water to people in developing countries. Please join me in welcoming Scott.
Scott H.: When I was four years old, my mother almost died. It was new year's Day, 1980. She walks across the bedroom and she collapses unconscious on the floor. Now, we had just moved into a new house. This is mom, dad, he was a businessman, middle-class family, she was a writer. And we just moved into this house to get closer to my father's office. Unbeknownst to us, the gas company had installed a furnace in this house that leaked carbon monoxide. So my mom fixing up the house in the winter starts to slowly die. After she passes out, we take her to the hospital, we find massive amounts of carbon monoxide in her bloodstream and she's never the same again. So I watched my mother go from this vibrant wife, mother picture of health to an invalid. Her immune system shut down, completely debilitated, allergic to the world.
Scott H.: I was an only child, family planning stopped after this accident. And I grew up in a caregiver role, I grew up taking care of mom, helping with the cooking, helping with the cleaning. I played piano in church, I didn't smoke, I didn't drink. I grew up in a good Christian family and I played by all the rules. And then at the age of 18, I stopped doing that and I said, you know what, now it's my turn. Now it's time to live for myself. I moved to New York City and I discovered that there was this extraordinary job in New York City called a nightclub promoter, where you could get paid to drink alcohol for free. All you had to do was get the right people inside the right nightclubs and you could charge them ...
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Scott H.: All you had to do is get the right people inside the right nightclubs and you could charge them $500 for a bottle of vodka. By the way, this was invented in New York City, not in Las Vegas. Okay. From the age of 18 to 28, I began filling up clubs, working at 40 different nightclubs. This is a picture of my life at 28-years-old in a VIP room sitting with my partner. What I thought was important at the time was the Rolex watch that I am pretentiously showing to some nightclub photographer that I've never even met before. I drove a BMW. I had the watch, I had the girlfriend on the cover of Elle magazine.
Scott H.: I had a grand piano in my New York City apartment, all the things, the Labrador retriever, all the things I thought would bring me happiness. But, it was a dark life. A little later, this is what I would have looked like. Some disgusting after hours over a plate of cocaine. 10 years of partying, and I woke up in South America one day and I was on this opulent vacation with all the people who had made it. Private planes, Dom Perignon, magnums, people playing $10,000 hands of blackjack and baccarat. I realized that I'd somehow become the worst person in the world.
Scott H.: The worst person I knew. I was leaving a meaningless legacy. My tombstone was going to read. Here lies a man who has gotten 1 million people drunk in the course of his life. I realized I needed a change and I decided what if my life could look exactly the opposite? What would 180 degrees look like? I came back to New York City and I said, I'm going to try something very different. I'm going to go return to a lost faith and a lost morality. I sold everything I owned, put up 2000 DVDs on Ebay in a single lot trying to purge my old life.
Scott H.: Then, I began to apply to the famous humanitarian missions that I had heard of, the World Visions and UNICEFs and Oxfams of the world. Scott Harrison, the great nightclub promoter is now ready for service. You can imagine what happened. I'm denied by every single organization. Nobody would let me anywhere near them. Finally, one organization says, if you're willing to go live in Liberia, a country I'd never even heard of, and if you're willing to pay us $500 a month, then you can volunteer. I said, this is perfect. This is really the opposite of my life.
Scott H.: I joined this medical mission as a volunteer photo journalist on this hospital ship, 500 foot hospital ship. Very simple idea, bring the best doctors and surgeons on their vacation time to people in need of medical care. We were going to sail into Liberia after the 14 year civil war had ended. I went all in. Before I got on the ship, I quit everything. I never smoked again. I never gambled again. I never touched coke or any of that stuff. Never looked at pornography or went to a strip club again. I wanted my life to look so different and step into a completely different story.
Scott H.: I found Liberia to be a disaster. People living in bombed out apartment buildings. The war had ruined the country. There was no electricity in the country. There was no running water in the country. There was no mail, no sewage system, and most importantly there was one doctor for every 50,000 citizens. Here in America, we have a doctor for every 200 of us. If you got sick, you were out of luck and before the ship arrived at the port, we would flyer the country. We'd put up these posters and say, if you've got a giant flesh eating tumor, if you were born with a cleft lip or a cleft palate, turn up on this day and maybe our doctors can help you.
Scott H.: The third day on the mission, 5:30 in the morning, I jump in a Land Rover. I'm in a hospital scrubs and we move in convoy towards the soccer arena, the football arena the government had given us. We had 1,500 surgery slots that we could fill over the whole many month long outreach. Turn the corner and there are over 5,000 people standing outside waiting to get in that stadium to see our doctors. This is a moment for me. I just began to weep, realizing thousands of people were going to be sent home without hope. We didn't have enough doctors.
Scott H.: We didn't have enough resources. The first child in line, the first child I photographed was this little boy named Alfred. 14-years-old, suffocating to death on his face with a benign tumor. His mom pulls out this photo and says, my son, four years ago at 10 he was completely fine, but then this tumor begins to grow and there was no surgeon that she could take him to. It was taking over his face and taking over his life. I realized that's why we were there. We were to help kids like Alfred. Couple days later, I watched this amazing surgeon operate on Alfred's face for free, remove his tumor, throw it in the medical waste.
Scott H.: Then a couple of weeks later, I got to take him home with his new face and watch him heal. It was a powerful year that turned into two years on that hospital ship, meeting extraordinary people, taking 50,000 photos and the whole time bombarding my club list with these photos. I did get some unsubscribes who were like, I turned up for that cool Prada party you through ones, but not the tumor party. But what I really learned was people wanted to help. They said, I had no idea that people were suffering like this, that there were doctors giving up their time to help.
Scott H.: How do I serve? How do I give? Well, my second tour, I got off the ship and into the villages and I wanted to see what was making people sick and I saw dirty water for the first time. I saw the water that people were drinking in the rural areas. They were drinking from swamps. I met a 13-year-old girl named Hawa drinking from a pond. Realize this was the only water she had her whole life. She was using this water to wash to bathe. I learned that 52% of disease throughout the developing world was caused by bad water and a lack of toilets, lack of sanitation.
Scott H.: Here we were picking up the pieces, turning away thousands of sick people, but no wonder half the country didn't have clean water. I became interested in this issue. Maybe this is the thing that I should work on. Came back to New York City and my friends were still buying bottles of water in nightclubs for $10 and not opening them. They'd walk in and spend 50 on water and just let it sit there and drink alcohol instead. I learned that this was a big problem. I'm running around New York City talking about this vision. What if I could help bring clean drinking water to everyone on earth?
Scott H.: What if I could use everything I learned in the night club days to tell a new story? Started learning about the problem. Learned that 663 million people, guys, this is one 10th of the planet today is drinking dirty water. In our world of technology and wealth and resources, one out of every 10 humans are drinking water. It's hard to connect with statistics, so over the years we've been telling stories of individual children, kids like John Bosco. This boy in southern Rwanda has never known water that was not this swamp. You guys are looking at this saying, we wouldn't let our dog drink out of this water, let alone a child.
Scott H.: But, it's all John Bosco had. This child in Honduras drinking from a river. Looks more like chocolate milk. As you can imagine, there are lots of diseases associated with water. You've all heard of cholera and E. coli. Maybe you haven't heard of schistosomiasis schistosoma fancy word for worms and parasites that in fact 200 million people. This is what that looks like. I met this child in Kenya. She was drinking from the Molo River and every time she would drink she would vomit on her shirt. We watched in horror. We took the water away from her.
Scott H.: We provided with clean water and we said, we'll try and do something for your village. But, I wanted to know what was actually in this water, what was making her sick. I took this bottle back to New York City and gave it to a lab and said, would you put this under a microscope and send me the video of what you see? This is what they sent me back. They said, we're not experts at all the different kinds of waterborne disease, but you send us water that is alive. Surely, no child should be drinking water that looks like this. Leeches, huge problem.
Scott H.: Traveling around to different countries, the women would would show us the leeches that they had to pick out of their water and they'd say, the big ones are never a problem for us, but sometimes these little leaches will get through the filtration devices that we use. Typically just cloth tee shirts and the leeches like to grow up inside their bodies in their children's bodies and the leeches crawl up to the back of the throat. Parents would tell us that when our children get leaches, we get them diesel fuel, a little bit of fuel to kill the leech.
Scott H.: Because if we use a stick and we don't actually kill the leech, then the leech just crawls back up again. Hard for us to imagine in a world where water comes out of taps and it's so prevalent, we buy it in bottles. We don't even need to. Schools without water. I learned that half of the schools in the world didn't have clean water or toilets. Now, I'm sure there are people in this room that are deeply passionate about education, but imagine sending your child to a school with no water and even more importantly no toilet. This is why teenage girls are dropping out.
Scott H.: They hit puberty, they stay home one week every month because they're ashamed to go to a school with no running water and no toilet. They fall behind in their studies. There's already enormous social pressure against so many of them to be educated because they're useful around the house. We see girls drop out and spend the rest of their days walking for water, 40 pounds of dirty water on their backs every single day. It's a women's issue. I've been to 69 countries now. Never seen men get the water. It is culturally the job of women and girls, whether it's in Africa or Central and South America or India or Southeast Asia.
Scott H.: It's the job of the women to get the water for the family. We see them in the most undignified situations digging in the sand looking for water, wading into rivers like this. The women in this village in eastern Kenya told me they were afraid of crocodile attacks. They listed the names of women who had come to get water and had never been seen again. It's a terrible human problem facing 660 million people. What's great about it is it's also a solvable problem. We know right now how to bring clean water to every human being on this planet. We are not scratching our heads. We are not looking for the answer in a test tube.
Scott H.: Maybe years in the future we can do it. We haven't allocated the resources. There hasn't been the will to do this and to help these people, but we know how to do it. A lot of different things work in a lot of different contexts. Sometimes you can dig a well, sometimes you can harvest the rain, you can harvest mountain springs, build gravity fed systems, bio sand filters, pond sand filters, drilling wells. It's often as simple as bringing in drilling equipment in for $12,000 providing clean water for an entire community.
Scott H.: What the community does not have access to is the a million dollars of drilling equipment, the compressors, the trucks, the rig or the skilled hydrologists who know how to find the water and bring it out of the ground. But, it is one of the most amazing experiences to be there in that moment when a community gets clean water for the very first time, to see clean water shoot out of the ground from two, 300 feet beneath, and to know that everything is going to change. To see the kids rush the drilling rig, clapping, dancing, splashing, touching and tasting clean water for the first time in their lives that was hidden underneath them the whole time.
Scott H.: Water changes everything. It is one of the most powerful things on earth. It is one of the most, the most powerful way we believe to lift people out of extreme poverty. Imagine your life without water. Imagine your life if you had no clean water, if you had to walk hours to get it. Water brings health to children, to families. It impacts education. If kids have clean water at their schools, if they're not walking hours every single day to a far away river or pond, they're better students. Gives time back to women. Just in Africa, 40 billion hours are wasted by women walking for water every year.
Scott H.: Imagine what you'd do with five hours back in your day times seven days a weeks. We hear incredible stories of women starting small businesses selling rice at the market, selling peanuts, selling rugs. Women tell us that they're better mothers. They get to spend more time with their families, less time walking, less time sick. One of the best things about working on this issue is it is one of the very few things in the world that everybody can agree on. In a toxic, caustic, angry world where people seem to want to fight about everything these days, nobody fights about water. Nobody thinks that human beings, that children should be drinking water that puts their life at risk.
Scott H.: It's a very big tent where people have different religious beliefs and different political beliefs can come together and say, we can believe in clean water. I started the organization just over a decade ago and it was a startup story, a couch was the office. I was living on a closet floor when I came back from Liberia and Soho, New York. Friend took me in. I'd given all my money to mercy ships and the people I met along the way, but I was passionate about this. I wanted to bring clean water to everybody on the planet. As I started talking to my friends, I realized this wasn't going to be easy because people that I knew, ordinary people, they did not trust charities.
Scott H.: I would hear these stories of scandal. People would say, charities are black holes. I don't know where my money goes. I don't know how much of my money will actually reach these people that I'm trying to help. Charities are inefficient. They're their waistline. I just kept hearing this. Came across the data. USA Today poll found 42% of Americans said they distrust charity. 70% of Americans believed charities waste money or badly waste money. This surprises people. America has a great reputation for being one of the most generous places in the world, but yet people don't trust the system.
Scott H.: I saw this as an opportunity. Rather than go get donors from other charities, let's give these people something they can believe in. Let's come up with a way to reinvent charity, to reimagine the business model, reimagine the experience of giving. I had three big ideas. The first was could we create a way where 100% of every donation we'd ever take would go directly to fund clean water projects. No overhead for the public. Then, they couldn't ask how much of my money goes because the answer would be the same every time, 100%. Opened up two bank accounts and said we'll find a very small separate group of business leaders and entrepreneurs to fund the overhead.
Scott H.: Second thing was we would prove what we did with the money. We would just show people here is where your money went. We started putting up every project on Google Earth and Google Maps, so people could see satellite images of these projects as they were built. The third thing was we would only work with local partners. I didn't think any guy that looked like me had a business running around drilling a well in Africa or India or Bolivia. We would raise the awareness and the money. We'd get people to care about this issue, but the work for it to be sustainable must be led by the locals helping their communities in their countries go forward.
Scott H.: It started with a birthday party. Day One, I have no better ideas than to get a night club, throw myself a 31st birthday party and lure 700 people there with open bar. They came and on the way and I said will you please donate $20? One person will get clean water. We raised $15,000 that night and we immediately took it 100% of the money to a refugee camp in northern Uganda where 30,000 people were living and drinking from a swamp. We sent the photos and the GPS back to the 700 people and said, you did this. You came to a party. You only gave $20, but people are drinking clean water because of you. Here's the proof. People were blown away.
Scott H.: They never expected to hear from us again, and we said this is the magic. Continue to close the loop. Show people their impact, and we can create a virtuous cycle of generosity and giving. We came up with different ways to tell the story. We said we don't always have to take ourselves so seriously. We can have some fun with the brands. Imagine Kool-Aid without water. Imagine giving your kid death in a baby bottle. We would never allow this. Why was it okay for 4,000 other kids to die every day? Because of where they were born. You didn't get to where you were born.
Scott H.: I didn't get to choose, nor did 1/10 of the world. We started shooting rich people in New York City in the same situations the people we were serving around the world. What if your kids going to a private school had to carry water on their back or your mom had to drink water with bone inherited as it came down from a slum or my banker friends in their Brioni suits went up to Central Park Pond at lunch hour. We built a digital only business. We said direct to mail. that's not the future. Social is the future. We were the first charity to get a million Twitter followers, the first charity to use Instagram.
Scott H.: We tried to build community and highlight the amazing things that everyday people around the world were doing for clean water. Then, we stumbled upon this idea we thought was was a really good idea for everyone who said, what if we could get people to donate their birthday to charity water? What if we get them to skip the gifts, not throw themselves a birthday party and ask for their age in dollar donations? I did this with my 32nd birthday and raised a ton of money, $32 at a time. This seven-year-old kid in Austin, Texas donates his seventh birthday.
Scott H.: He starts knocking on doors, raises $22,000. Now, he lived in a nice neighborhood. There were some like 77s and 777s. This starts spreading. Tony Hawk donates his birthday, raises $20,000. Jack Dorsey gives up three birthdays, raises almost $200,000. Angela Ahrendts from apple sends out one email, raises over $100,000 as she's celebrated by her business community. Will and Jada Smith in Hollywood, they give up their birthday. Then, they asked their fans to follow suit and they actually come with me to Ethiopia to see the impact that their birthday had made.
Scott H.: All that was cool. What was most exciting was six-year-olds in New York City like Laurie or 16-year-olds in the middle of the country like Maggie Moran. One of my favorites, 89-year-old, Nona Wein, donating her birthday. Her mission statement says it all. "I'm turning 89 I would like to make that possible for more people." She's lived double the life expectancy in so many of these places where we work because of the privilege that she was born into. Her birthday could help people have more birthdays, then that's how she wanted to celebrate her 89th.
Scott H.: What we realized early on was that Charity: Water was not our story. It was their story. It was the story of our community, of our donors, of our volunteers, of our fundraisers like Max and Maggie and Nona, the story of our local partners, of our beneficiaries. We were the guide. We were not the hero. We were trying to inspire everyday people to make a difference and then be as good stewards of that as possible and allow them to make an impact and connect that to them, connect them to that impact. We focused on radical transparency, funding drilling rigs, mounting GPS units to our rigs, so you could track them in real time.
Scott H.: We even give our rigs Twitter accounts so they tweet their location when they drill wells. As we expanded the portfolio 27 countries, we worked with Google on a $5 million grant to go build a remote sensor. We wanted to know not only that our projects were built and that they were working when we left, but were they working over time. We opened sourced a remote sensor after working with 20 different labs that were now retrofitting in our wells. We're now able to go to someone who gave up their birthday and pick out their well from a map of many, not only show them exactly how much it cost and show them the satellite image of that well.
Scott H.: Now, we can show them daily flow rates five years later and behavior and see how people are using this. We're learning that women are getting up at 4:02 AM and getting clean water to begin their days in the cool of the day. See afternoon drop-offs when the sun is hot. During this pilot, we amassed the largest data set of global water supply in the history of the world because nobody ever cared to do it before. 11 years of Charity: Water, now we've been joined by over a million supporters around the world. A million people have rejected the apathy that would be so easy with an issue like this.
Scott H.: It just doesn't affect us. Everyone in this room, you have clean water. But a million people said other people should, too. They've now helped us fund projects in over 28,000 villages for 8.2 million people, 8.2 million people with access to clean water.
Scott H.: This year we're helping 3,561 people get clean water every day. By the time I get off the stage, 80 people will have gotten clean water, not thanks to me, not thanks to Charity: Water thanks to this amazing community around the world. We now employ over 1,600 locals across the world working on Charity: Water projects, and I am so proud of them, them showing up the local heroes, leading their communities in their countries forward. As I look back a little personally, this guy from the club days is completely unrecognizable to me. This guy filled with hate and with rage and self-loathing.
Scott H.: As I found my purpose through serving others, through using my voice in my time in my town and my money to end the needless suffering of others, I've been blessed with an amazing family, a beautiful wife, two beautiful children. I just wrote a book about the experience and it was one of the hardest process of my life. I don't know how many of you here have been written, but, wow, 18 months of deep soul search searching darkness. I'm really proud of what came out calling the book Thirst. We just released it for pre-order. I'm donating 100% of the advance, 100% of the book to the organization to hopefully spread the story of water, spread the story of this amazing community around the world.
Scott H.: If you want to support, you can learn about it on Thirst book and we're actually making 2,000 available for this audience. All you have to do is just fill out a form that was attached, the hang tag attached to your water bottle and we'll send it to you for free. Guys, I recently visited the first well built on day one of Charity: Water at a night club and it is not a pretty well after 10 years of use. It is banged up. The clean water was still flowing and we reckon it's been pumped, that handle has been pumped 50 million times from some people that went to a club in threw 20 bucks in a bin.
Scott H.: John Bosco, we got to go back and visit him, too. When we first met him, this little boy drinking unthinkable water from a swamp with his entire family. Then because strangers from across an ocean cared about him, heard about his story, ane funded the water project, drilling rigs started rolling towards his village and he got to watch local Rwandans jump out and find clean water underneath. Couple of days later, they began building the well and less than a week later, this little boy's life was transformed and he was drinking clean water for the first time in his life.
Scott H.: We visited him eight years later and we found our boy, John Bosco. He's not a boy anymore. He's a man and in that time he's gotten married and he had a daughter. His daughter is Jean Marie, and we realized that she never had to drink from the swamp. She never had to risk her life walking into that disgusting water that her parents drank and her grandparents drank and that the cycle of poverty was broken in her village because everybody, people just cared. As we look forward, 8.2 million. It's a lot of people. It's 4,000 or 5,000 more than the people in this room, but it's 1.2% of the global problem.
Scott H.: It's 1/80 of the work that we need to do. We need to go faster. We need to grow the movement. We need to involve more and more people. My question to you, my challenge to you is what could you do about it? Would you join us? Would you be able to sit there and say, I believe that people should have clean water to drink. I believe in a world where every man, every woman, every child has his basic need met. As we turned 10, we wanted to create a brand new community going forward. We said, what if we could create a community so constant, so generous the world had never seen anything like it before.
Scott H.: We called it The Spring. We've had a lot of one-time givers. We've had a lot of one-time birthdays. We said, what if we could get people to show up month in and month out and and fight for change? We realize that the average person in this room, myself included, we have 11 subscriptions these days. Netflix, Spotify, Hulu, Dropbox, cable, magazines. We get benefit from these subscriptions. We're loyal to these companies. We said, what if we could create a program where 100% of the benefit was passed on to others? 100% of the benefit was passed on to people who needed water?
Scott H.: We called it The Spring and we said, it only costs us $30 to give one person clean water to move a human being from the swamp or the river to the well or the rainwater system or the spring. There's a lot of people in the world that can do two Netflixes a month, could do a dollar a day. There's a lot of people in this room I think they could do that without even thinking about it. We started talking about The Spring and just inviting people to join this amazing community and began to spread around the world. We said, our job is to provide stories of impact, to tell people what we're doing with their money, what their money is doing all around the world.
Scott H.: It's now grown to 94 countries and we have kids giving up their allowances to become Spring members. We have people in their nineties giving from their pension to be a part of this community. That's my ask for you. I left my wife and my kids at home to stand up here on behalf of people living without clean water. We worked with OKTA for good to create a very special link charitywater.org/okta, where if you wanted to participate, if you could give 10, 20, 30, 50, $100 a month, we could actually track the impact of the people in this room forever and know how many people were getting access to clean water.
Scott H.: I invite you to join me. It is one of the most amazing things to be able to use our time, to use our talents, to use our resources to end the needless suffering of others, to make a difference in the world, to teach our families, to teach our children, teach our business community about generosity, about giving. It changed my life and I know it's changed a lot of other people who have gotten involved in meaningful causes. I'll end with my final quote, my favorite quote. Somebody was passing a bodega in New York City and took a picture of this on a sign.
Scott H.: It's from an old, ancient rabbinic texts and it says, "Do not be afraid of work that has no end." Do not be afraid of work that has no end. Now, I believe we are going to end the water crisis in our lifetime. I firmly believe that. But when we do, the Charity: Water team is not going to drop the mic and go work at a bank and try and go rich, get rich. We'll turn everything we've learned, we'll turn our generous community on another issue, maybe hunger, maybe shelter, maybe a justice issue. Because if your work is in the pursuit of others, the pursuit of compassion, of empathy, it will never end, and that's the way you're supposed to live.
Scott H.: You'll be so blessed because of that. I hope some of you will join us. Thank you for your time.
Speaker 5: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome back Ryan Carlson.
Ryan Carlson: Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. Don't leave. Please. Just a couple of words about that amazing and inspirational speech. I hope that like me, you're not just inspired that you'll take action. That link is important and I want to, sorry. I have a young daughter, so I'm going to personally match $5,000 of any donations you make to that link, and more than that, I was talking to Freddy backstage. He's going to match a $10,000 personally to any donations you guys make, so act please. Please.
Ryan Carlson: We had a lot for you here this morning. That was super inspirational. We're not done with that. When you guys come back this afternoon, we have another inspirational presentation from Dr. Mae Jemison at 2:45. With that, please enjoy the breakout session. We'll see you back here this afternoon. Thank you.
PART 4 OF 4 ENDS [02:10:28]
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