The Role of Consumer Identity in Driving Enterprise Business Value

We'll begin with a quick round of self interactions. All, is this working? It will be okay. Something on there, but anyways, first of all, it's, it's a great pleasure to be here. Thank you for, I know this whole CRM field is evolving and we need more of these conferences to really exchange ideas around the technology. As we actually heard, there's a lot of gaps between, you know, what CRM is and what it can do from digital transformation, but that my name is Thomas. I work for, for drop. I run the customer value management team at, for drop.

And for those of you who may not know for drop, we used to be part of some Microsystems long time ago. In 2010, man, Oracle acquired some microsystem. We became independent company. And since then we have done or achieved a lot of milestones, both in terms of product, as well as customer acquisitions.

Today, we have more than 500 customers, including many big names, HSC VC, etcetera BMW. So lots and lots of big customers within the customer value management team. The charter of my team is to help our customers and prospects understand, identify and quantify the business value that they would get with the CIM implementation.

So it's, for me, it's really a fantastic job I visit to, I get to visit a lot of the customers, understand the challenges, understand what they're trying to do in the C field and, and help them understand how they can benefit from an overall C No, I think this works so well, Thomas, I think I'm gonna ask you some questions after this, based on that introduction. So hi everyone. My name is Rushal. I run the product marketing organization for Gigia now an SAP hybrid company, as part of gig, giga has been around for those of you who are new to customer identity.

Management's been around for 10 years, started off in the social login and widget space, but then have pivoted about six years ago, establishing the customer identity and access management category, and then driving innovation through that, to what you see and what we have here today.

So I totally agree with you in the fact that we need more conferences like this and, and really push and, and make sure that various industries, whether you're both B2B or B2C or B2B TOC in coming here and understanding educating, because when you understand more about customer identity in general and devising a customer identity strategy, then that will not only help you with your digital transformation, but really it gets you to be part of and your organization to be more part of the digital economy. So have to be here today, today, and, and answer any questions if you have and over To you.

Great. I'm Dr. I'm a reform consultant. I spent about 20 years doing consulting with Deloitte and other companies. Last job was as a global chief information security officer. Then I decided to do something different. So now I'm full time academia in South Korea. So I got a little bit of a cold it's minus 12 in Korea right now. So a lot more right here.

I, I find this space extremely interesting, cuz like all of you, I kind of grew up in a, in a place where, you know, this was all about a person and a number. That's what C identity management was. And now we're, it's changing quite a bit in our university. We teach the students about in industry for this new world, we're blending this, the cyber and the physical. So in doing so we want to be practical about it.

And we, we talk to the students about all the things that, you know, happen here in this room and the conversations they're up. So when they go out there, they're a little bit more prepared than just, you know, knowing some facts. So that's why I'm here on.

Great, welcome. You can tell from the introductions, cuz you're a little bit longer than marketing people, but that's actually perfect.

So, you know, our topic is driving enterprise business value, something. We have the right people to talk about.

You know, we, I've kind of approached from a theoretical standpoint cause now Analyst, here's what we see customers doing. You have the hands on knowledge of exactly what your customers are doing. They're using your solutions for, you know, increasing the enterprise value, finding and solving new business cases that they may not have known consisted until, you know, solutions are in place. So if you want to just start off, go down the line, tell, tell a story or two about how C has solved the business problems or help people realize they have a problem and can solve that. Yeah.

Guess I'll start. And maybe from a slightly different angle, you know, because I'm not in consulting anymore. I don't buy anything. I don't sell anything.

So it's, it's a nice way to kind of have a perch on this problem I didn't have before, but I have watched for a while, how this has transformed. As I mentioned before, it used to be a name, a person and a number. That's how we identified things. And it was all about that claimed identity and really kind of betting that person are you who say you are and if so you can do some transactions, I'm oversimplified and now we've moved more from the who to the what, you know, what are you, what do you like?

You know, what are your preferences? And so the definition of identity management has changed so much that, you know, the value to me, isn't so much who you are and the claimed identity, but it's much more the, the what, what is it about you that we can, that we can talk about that we can aggregate in, in a good way for, for business and start bringing these things together in it's very contextual, what you are right now, ING today it may change an hour from now, depending on if you're someplace else in the mall and have a preference to buy something. So this is the hard part.

The question has changed in terms of, you know, what is your preferences and what is all that makeup about you that becomes the identity management part, the value. And I'm not sure we're prepared for that CRM for, I use this as a simplified example, customer relationship management, those systems, which we've invested so much money in over years start built for what I just described. So we're having to change a lot, but starts with that notion of how are we describing people. And that's, I guess I add on to that.

I, I would say fundamentally, I think the approach around customer identity has been solved from historically, at least from I think one side of, of the tracks. And if, if you were to think of it this way, a lot of it, I would say technology investments have gone in to try and solve the, the question of not only who you are, but what you care about using what I call infer technologies. Like if you're thinking about how do I know an anonymous user that comes to a website and then track their behavior and then infer from that behavior, what they may or may not like.

And I think what is interesting and what has evolved at least over the past five or six years is the fact that there's a, there's a, there's one, a dissatisfaction with only using that approach. It's not getting brands or, or companies the reach that they like to have. It's not getting them the accurate, the accurate targeting that they like to achieve. And it's not ultimately getting the conversion that they're looking for.

I think what the movement that has been happening is this movement towards how can I get better first party known self volunteered data about a customer and how can I then use that to build rich profiles that then can be used in driving better marketing strategies, driving better personalization strategies and ultimately better customer experience strategies. And so when we're talking to our clients today, this is fundamentally the angle or the perspective that they're coming from is how do I better engage with my customer? How do I better?

How do I, how do I build a better two-way relationship with my customer, such that there is a true value for information exchange. And then based on that, how can I use that to give them the experiences that they're looking for?

So John, you ask for a couple of examples, I'll start with one. And if I have time, I'll go with the other one as well. But these are some good examples of how our customers are leveraging CR platform to pretty much do a digital transformation. And so let's start with Pearson and, and by the way, so when I mention a account name, a customer name it's, it's not confidential. These people have their case case studies on our website. So you are welcome to go read about it as well. So any data that I will talk about today is not confidential.

So that's something that we take it, you know, very seriously, we don't divert any confidential information. So having said that, so Pearson is 172 year old company. They have 36,000 employees, 4.5 billion pounds in revenue. They have hundreds of digital products developed by different software teams within the company. So each of those hundred plus products have different user experience, access management techniques, et cetera, etcetera. Internally, if you look at the it organization, they have 300 of 3000 plus applications. They have 63 instances of ERP.

They have 40 unique or separate Salesforce instances. And each Salesforce instance you can imagine has a lot of customer data right now. So they are transforming all of that business, this by putting in a CIM layer underneath to not only standardize some of the access management for the digital products, but also having a centralized identity. I don't want to say that they're gonna store all the identities in one place, but they can then combine identities and make sense of a student's 360 degree vehicle. And the vision that they have is. So for first of all, who are the consumers?

The consumers are students in schools, university students, as well as young professionals. What they want to do is grab that person when they're a high school student or a middle school student and capture that person's identity that person's learning, that person is learning the way that person learns better. Right? So with John, you may be learning math in a different way than I, I may be learning, right? Some people learn visually better. Some people learn by reading.

Some people learn by doing so what PS wants to do is understand that type of information and then deliver better learning methods to each of those individuals in a very, very inized way, which cuts down on the cycle type of learning, which also makes better learning for those, those people. So it's not only about marketing is not only about, there are a lot of different ways our customers are thinking about value of identity, right? So I go back to Bean's presentation.

And, and one of the things you mentioned was in the identity management space, it was harder to build a business case, right? And we have seen that many times when we are talking at a certain level of people within a company, they don't understand the higher level vision of the company and how the top level can utilize all of that information to make the company much more efficient and, and effective for their customers. But at the silos, it's very hard for these people to understand.

And, and that's, that's why we have created this group, my group that is now breaking down those barriers within, for our customers, right? So, so our CEOs and our executive management talk to top level guys, and they totally understand the vision. Right. But when we start talking about the actual deal of actual, you know, product specific things they're talking about, well, does your solution do Samuel and or, and all these type of stuff, but those two, those two are totally different, you know, conversations, right? So we need, we need to make sure that we are making that link.

And that's the way to answer your question. That's the only way we can join, or we can make companies understand the benefits of cm to things like this digital transformation. Because right now, I don't think a lot of companies or a lot of individuals within companies understand that.

And, and I can, you know, if you have time, I can go on to BBC story and story and all that. But each block of these customers are, are really getting unique value proposition from implementing C possible. Just to add one more component on this.

I think, you know, how we frame the conversation typically too, is around human beings. I mentioned this industry Porwal, which is actually pretty, pretty well known here in Asia, surprising, not so much in, in America, which I, I think maybe they'll change, but certainly where I'm in, in Korea and China, what they're starting to wrestle with as well is we are delegating so much of human activity to devices, smart devices, and those things, all this stuff that, that those things take on our identity to some degree or have their own identity to some degree.

And so being able to now put that into a picture of how do we manage these things that we've delegated, particularly when they have some intelligence to them injecting them with AI a lot. So now when they do these things, are they, is it on our behalf? Do they have a preference reflecting our preference and how do we manage all those, those other items? And that's a whole aspect to identity management that is new, but we're certainly industries in industry for that space are ING. Yeah.

And I think interestingly to that, I, I think IOT just represents yet another channel with yet another opportunity connect to consumer to a thing in those things as a device. And fundamentally, if you do actually have a central vision around customer identity and your strategy around that, there's no reason why you, couldn't not only make the access as frictionless and seamless as possible, but now you're capturing that preference information, that consent information, and then new things will be coming, understanding voice recognition, whatnot.

So that, you know, I'm the one who's ordering from amazon.com, you know, not my seven year old niece and ordering 40 pounds of cookies. So, you know, I think, I think those types of things are, are coming and already, you know, we, we are actively working with clients today who have a strong IOT strategy and trying to integrate that in as part of not only just the access management part of the identity management piece.

And I would say layered onto that there's a real important component and yet maybe not an actual metric, but a real important component around consent and being able to know what, what are you actually consenting to in terms of the authorized use of your identity? What, what are you allowing in terms of the types of, of communication and the preferences that you like to be communicated with?

I know this is also top of mind with a lot of our, with a lot of our customers, not, not that just not that highly regulatory environments, but those even in north America as well, increasingly growing here in, in Asia and APAC, I think you couldn't Google across having a discovery call with the customer without them immediately asking, okay, what does this mean in terms of privacy and compliance and how, how should we be thinking about it, not just on this project, but holistically across our, Our, our enterprise.

We wanna build on something that Thomas said a and maybe just a little bit controversial, interested in all three opinions on the subject. So in, in your example, Thomas, you're talking about adding a CIA layer and perhaps integrating multiple other identity systems to the focus of this question CS, what do you see the relationship between cm and CRM going forward? What is the relationship, is that, can you, would you predict that certain lines of business will ultimately get more use out of cm versus CRM? Do you see a reduced role in, in some companies for CRM as C becomes more prevalent?

Yeah. And I think that depends on what is the complexity that companies are dealing with within the existing infrastructure. So for example, this particular case, if I have 40 different Salesforce instances, I am not going to try and consolidate all of that in the next couple of years, right? Because that's, that's a huge task. So my best bet is going to be try and somehow connect the identities within these CRM systems and be able to get information so that out of these, so that I can form a 360 degree view of a customer, right?

So, and we've seen that we've actually working with the media company recently, and they have a similar issue, not just for CRM, but they have identity data in other systems as well, right? CRM, marketing systems, ERP system, et cetera. And that's what they're trying to do now to build these connectors so that they can pull in the right amount of data and then get a 360 review our customers.

Now, if, if for example, if the customer, the current situation is that they have only, let's say couple CR systems, and then they are both parties are willing to sacrifice and, and merge them together. Then that that's a possibility.

And, and I can tell you, I worked with so many different customers where I've seen those silos fight with each other 10 nail, not giving up their CRM system. So I, I I've been to a customer and I don't to name this one. It's not public information where couple of the divisions we using Oracle CR and couple of them are using Salesforce CR. And those either of those two could give up their system. They want to hang onto it, even though the it guys are saying, guys, can we do some compromise?

You know, because for it, it is better to have one manageable system, but the, the business groups are not going to give that out. And it does not have the power over the business to, to force them to do that. So I think case like case basis, people are going come up with, you know, different ways to approach that problem. Sure. I think adding on to that, I would say fundamentally, I don't think cm is going to displace CRM or any type of, or any of these solutions that are in place today that either executes on customer data or manages customer data.

I think what CIM and the opportunity that's there is that it actually improves how you can drive data governance around your identity, your profile, and the consent, and the communication preferences around that such that you have a single source of truth around the, the, the account information, the, the, the consent that's been granted to that by that, by that individual on that account and, and communication preferences and ensuring that that can actually be synchronized across the various systems within, within the digital stack.

And, and when you're talking about working with large fortune 1000 companies, they're, multi-branded, they're multi reaching over multi geography, right? And so they're gonna have multiple systems with the same type of technology. We work with one, one large CPG customer that has over 1500, just imagine this right, 1500 sites, different digital properties that they have to connect with across 200 different types of applications D up across the, the hundred and 60 some countries that they operate in. And they have, you know, hundreds of brands that, that they work on.

And a lot of those brands do operate autonomously or not, if not have their own digital staff associated to that brand. And the question is, how do you not only make access management easy for them, but then how do you manage that identity? And then how do you ensure that that identity is consistently being governed across the core areas that they operate in? And I think this is really the differentiating point for CIM is not to replace or displace, but to be an, a great complimentary solution in thriving what I would call identity and profile governance. Yeah.

I would sort of say the same thing. You know, my last job with, with one of the large, big four, you know, same thing, we had 165 countries, you know, we're managing clients, we're managing our own employees and doing it across multiple systems.

And, you know, I think we kind of gave up trying to see which technology was gonna win, but we could also see down the future that it wasn't gonna be used for either or approach that probably will see a third category that these will merge when you're seeing this with lots of different security technologies that these two will, will, will start to merge and a different type of solution will, will come out. That I think that's probably where I'd see this going rather than trying pick a winner or loser.

I don't think either, either space right now is, is, is scaffolded is constructed well enough to attack the problem that we're not really with their terribly competitors at this point, that we know that there are savvy CIOs out there that are looking to automate sales, further automate sales and find ways to reduce their software SA licensing costs. So I think it's safe to say they're not competing today, but that may not be true tomorrow. So questions from the audience, go ahead. I couldn't help.

But note, John, when you were talking about the total market value of this space at 20 million, the first person that asked where that came from was that's true. If one unpack that one could say that your market estimate was validated by the acquisition of gig, you SAP for 350 million, that math I think would be about confirmed, right? But my question is Richard Richard and others talked about a separation between consumer and customer identity.

And I wonder if that distinction is being continued to be blurred by very traditional enterprise players like SAP purchasing what we would call consumer oriented industry leaders like GIGO. And I was wondering if I don't have any comments about this redefinition of what's consumer, what's a customer, et cetera, Come to my keynote tomorrow at nine.

So, you know, what's interesting, you know, when I saw that slide up there and I saw the customer, I am the consumer I am. And I, I do agree that goes from millions to hundred hundreds of millions kind of leads back to what I was referring to earlier. I consider to me consumer, if you're talking about, I fundamentally, I fundamentally believe that there is tremendous opportunity in establishing a trusted two-way relationship between brand and user as early as possible in the customer journey.

Fundamentally, if you understand, if you believe in that theory, then I say, really a consumer can get known just as early as part of the awareness phase with just as little information about themselves as needed, based on the value that they're looking to derive after, off of giving that information. So, you know, you think about a newsletter sign up. What's so big about a newsletter signup.

Well, there's some derived value that a user wants from the information they're gonna get out of that content. And in exchange, they need to be able to receive that content. So they're willing to give up their email or their, their phone number or whatever. However they wanna, whatever medium they wanna receive that on. I would say that then you're looking that that's not a registered user. That's not that to me is not a fully registered user.

That is, that is a light account that, that somebody has created. But if you take a step back from that, you think about anonymous visitors to, to digital properties, that those anonymous visitors are truly in them. And the only thing that's tracking them is probably a cookie ID or a mobile ad ID or whatnot. And you can say that the information that you're gathering about them is not truly preference. As I said, it's behavioral data. It's inferred that then you have to infer kind of what they may or may not like off of that, that is truly variable.

And it's, it's just, there's just nothing deterministic about it. Right? And based on, on plenty of research that's been done, you can find that the, the accuracy of using that for targeting methods in marketing campaigns, let's say is, is, is moderate right week to moderate. So in my mind, I, I think our ability to identify somebody more deterministically earlier on the cycle is I think where the innovations at CIM is gonna come from, I think is merging and blending.

The, the, the probabilistic information you're getting off of this inferred behavioral tracking, along with that first party data is only gonna create really robust audiences and profiles that then are, are going to be used. So when I think of somebody, you know, when I think of where the position that we, you know, that gig is, and now kind of going back to your original conversation, I, I think the SAP Gigia union makes really great sense. When you think about SAP today already manages over 75% of the world's customers data.

If you, from a back end perspective, if you think about that, and now you're bringing to the front end, this notion of, of a CIA solution that can now help kind of try, you know, capture that through those digital experiences and then be able to create that identity service that integrates in on the back end side of the house. That can be very powerful. Mega vendors today have really invested a lot. I can say on the probabilistic side, you can run down.

I think over $2 billion of investments have been made by Adobe Salesforce, Oracle, IBM beyond focusing really on that probabilistic inferred technologies. Right? And I don't believe they're receiving the return on their investment that they had anticipated largely because they're only solving part of the equation.

And I say, now I think people are recognizing that they need to have a full breadth of data in order to figure out how to create those profiles to provide better personalization. Hopefully that answered your question.

Well, let me follow up with another request for comment. So prior to you're eating into our lunch, I'm sorry. I'll just question quick answer. Prior to yeah. Position giga, Microsoft acquired LinkedIn. So that's 26 billion for 450 million identities. Would you say the same rationale applying or similar?

I, I think they, they made a smart acquisition in what my opinion means in this matter, really probably zero, but, but from a trend per from a trend perspective, I think they saw an op I think they too were like, okay, what are we gonna do in this space? What is our big next move? We know we're solid in B2B. Let's continue to drive B2B, don't have B2B identity data. Let's go get it. Who's the best, who's the best target to go get that? I think LinkedIn makes more Lincoln sense for them to go do that and then continue to use that data to drive.

And I know just based on, you know, co former colleagues of friends that I know in Microsoft and LinkedIn, respectively, you know, they're already really actively talking about how are they driving those integrations and then, and then benefiting from U utilizing that data. But I think B2B identity data is a very important up to crack.

And, and I think Microsoft took great steps in trying to start to crack that, To try to put it all back together. We started more talking about user experience of post post-acquisition. There's a lot said about the need for usability of LinkedIn these days. So we have lunch now, back here at two o'clock. Thank you to the, and feel free to continue the conversation lunch time. Excellent.