European Identity & Cloud Awards Ceremony 2021

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen here on site in Munich, and of course, online, welcome to the European identity and CloudWatch 2021. Yes, it's the 13 time that we honor outstanding projects in the area of identity and access management, digital transformation, and all other fields. We yearly cover in this great conference before we kick off with our awards and the famous projects, which we had a huge number of applications for. I want to ask one more time, Martin, Komika back on stage because he's the head of the jury who decided who will win our award this year.

So welcome Martin back on stage. I had, I had to make the long round, you know, so I took a mask off on cetera. So here I am. Thank you for coming back on stage. Yes. Just quickly. Maybe you can just figure out or tell the audience some points. What does a project need to win the award?

Yeah, so, so first I wanna thank you. Say thank you to a lot of organizations for chef entered application for an award. So we had really quite a number and that is good and bad for, for the ones who are, are looking at these applications.

And so, so what we are really looking for is we are looking for projects that are very innovative, so that go beyond what we see in other projects that go beyond the standard or that deal with a specific type of complexity from the organizational side, from the topic they are solving. So something which is beyond what we common see or which is done very, very, so roughly, maybe above what, what we, we usually see, or which is really about big. So things which are just due to sheer size, hard to manage. So it's really the things which stand out from what we've seen more frequently.

And sometimes it's a tough decision. I have also to say, sometimes it's really a tie a little bit, and then we need to make our, our minds and, and, and think about what is the better thing to do. So that's what we do. And we try to be fair and pick out as things where we see think others can learn something out of these projects. Cool. So maybe a project does have not, when this year might have the chance for next year as well.

If, if it shows some, some, some addition, some improvements, some, some other things. Sometimes it's also that project, our trust a little early, maybe. Yes. Okay. So a hint for all applicants this year. Thank you very much. Thank you. First category. This year is customer identity and access management. And therefore I want to ask my colleague and I am practice director of call Matthias Reinwarth on stage, Good evening customer or consumer oriented identity management is more than just an enabler for online shopping. The areas of application are much larger and encompass.

So many more aspects beyond filling a shopping card and checking out excellence in this area means creating a comprehensive and individual relationship with the customer also in the digital world and extending it between customer loyalty, brand personality and user satisfaction. Excellent user experience are essential. If you want to create sustainable customer loyalty and build a community when this has an impact in personal in family aspects in leisure time activities, leisure time, especially the notorious quality time is the area in which particularly high requirements are made.

And rightly so, because this time is scarce high requirements for the necessary identities for, for a continuous user journey, easy entrance, low threshold access to services, to products and facilities. We all know inconsistent user experiences due to isolated solutions may quickly spoil the fun. Today. We are honoring a solution that managed to provide unified identities and access management for a multitude of interconnected experiences.

In a very short time, we are talking about just under four months, a couple of highlights, more than 1 million accounts for use in both digital and physical life with a strong upward trend. And the product we are talking about is fun and entertainment, seamless migration, and merging of existing accounts from previously disjoint systems into a single customer identity.

And everything is an API approach that enables deep into creation into services and the agility needed to create innovative offerings, family management, loyalty programs, strong yet user friendly authentication, including passwordless concept management and comprehensive user self services. All in all a textbook example of C I a M as the basis, and the enabler of excellent services, usability and modern digital innovations. The winner is the winner is so no sound. The winner is arepa park with the representative, Michael, and he's the manager of digital platforms. Welcome to the stage. Yeah.

Well, thank you for granting this award to us. I think I can speak for the whole Mac family and all employees of the Europa park resort for that. We are truly passionate for granting this award to us tonight, considering that our main business predominantly evolves around real life entertainment and hospitality. This recognition proves how important digital has become for many industries alike, and that we are one on the right track of digitally transforming and expanding the customer experience at the Europa park resort because of COVID 19.

And the related lockdowns of the whole result the past two years have been the toughest in the history of our family business, which spends for over more than 245 years. But I think in every crisis, there is an opportunity. And while in lockdown, we quickly expanded our portfolio of digital products and services like online ticketing, mobile apps, and even virtual queuing systems for our attractions, so that we were able to restart our business safely, even under continuously changing governmental regulations with the Mac one account as our new central identity and access platform.

We were not only able to further align the digital customer experience by offering our guests a single and secure account, connecting the diverse, very diverse digital world of the Europa park resort. But Mac one also makes future developments faster and easier, more reliable, and more cost effective.

However, the success of Mac one would not have been possible without the great minds at CDAs who accompanied us from the initial concept phases throughout the whole implementation process. So here go is a big thank you to the whole team of Cedars for supporting us in this exciting journey. I think your efforts and expertise were fundamental to the success of this project.

Last part, not least. I would also like to thank all involved teams at Europa park and our management part in particular, who strongly pushes the digital transformation of the whole result with his passion and vision for the years to come again. Thank you. Take take with you the certificate and the, you come for me for photo photo opportunity here. Yeah. So congratulations for my site as well.

And yes, we are getting up to the next category. The next topic we are now awarding is identity fabrics and enterprise IM. And to announce the winner for this category. I want to ask my colleague and senior Analyst at KuppingerCole Paul Fisher stage.

Well, good evening, everyone. Thanks. This award is for the category identity fabrics and enterprise. I am the winner was prepared to undergo a big bang approach to replacing an existing identity management suite, which it did very successfully. The existing solution consisted of multiple servers in different environments and was becoming extremely time consuming and challenging to maintain. Everything had to be customized. What should have taken two months often took a year.

The project had a hem impact on the whole company, including regular employees, admins, and typical of today's environment. Many service accounts altogether over 50,000 identities and more than 100 apps were onboarded for the project. As a global engineering business operating in challenging markets are winner has many contractors and service accounts that are constantly changing securely. Maintaining the provisioning and deprovisioning of accounts is crucial to mitigate risk and to keep the business moving.

So the organization was looking for, and it got stronger identity, lifecycle management, better access request, and approval management, access certification, and analytics to train to track often and scale accounts. This project was a winner because it went beyond the workforce to contractors and service accounts with broad capabilities and most importantly room to scale.

In addition, the project was all done remotely via video conferencing during the toughest operating conditions that we all know about the company aimed for one to one replacement, but it also improved simplified and automated the process and came out with a stronger, with stronger integrations that did not exist before this project stood out for its level of detail and complexity. Moving from one system to another in one girl was hugely ambitious given the environment they were working in, but it weird worked.

So I'm delighted to announce that the winner of this award for the identity fabrics and enterprise, I am goes to Danfoss. And please welcome to the stage Mr.

Yens, who to receive the award. Congratulations. Would you like to say something? Yeah. We were from Denver site, like to thank you very much for the nomination and getting the award, this whole product, as you said, was done during the COVID. That was really a challenge, no physical access to, to learn the team from Nixon and without their help, we were not succeeded that's for sure. They really, really got a, this product up and running and completed at time. And there was some delays, but that was not on your side.

So we were really happy with the corporation and could recommend you on different. Likewise. Good. Thanks. Thank You. We'll just do a quick photo Next category stealing again with customer, but this time it's about customer authentication and yeah, for this category, I want to ask, copy our calls, lead Analyst, Analyst, Alexei Balaganski on stage Good evening. So people often say that the customer is always right. Whether you agree with this model in general is up to you.

But I guess we all can, won't argue that when it comes to identity management and cyber security, you just no longer works at all. Anything the customer can potentially do wrong will eventually happen. That would lead to a lost sale to potentially brand reputation damage, or even in the worst case scenario to a data breach due to the identity is the major attack vector for any modern business and finding the right balance between zero customer friction and zero attack.

Chance is extremely difficult, especially now when so many industries are affected by the pandemic eliminating passwords and replacing them be strong, get adaptive and frictionless multifactor of indication in their approach. Well, all security experts, including asset Nicole have been recommending for years and yet successful projects of this kind are still pretty rare. All this makes the project be honored today, even more impressive considering the share scale because the company that implemented it currently serves millions of users all around the world, practically in every country.

And they manage to seamlessly support a broad range of authentication options. And at the same time protect both their customers and themselves from various cyber attacks, 300% increase in conversion rates was I presume just a pleasant bonus on top of that, just like the EIC award for the best customer authentication project. So without further delays, the winner is sky scanner represented by Mr. Michael Bullock. So Louis welcome on stage. Yeah. Wow. Thank you very much.

This is, this is really a great honor and yeah, we're, I'm privileged to be here to accept this award. Firstly, thanks to keeping a call for putting on such a fantastic event. I've really, you know, I've really enjoyed the last couple of days. I've met some amazing people and it's just great to, you know, be here and, you know, learning about the future of identity. But secondly, I, I really wanna thank the, the amazing group of people that I work with in sky Canada. I feel privileged to be part of the team.

There's a great culture there of innovation where, you know, we're always encouraged to kind of think outside the box and do things. And I, and I'm, you know, I'm pleased that that innovation hopefully has been rewarded here and feel very gratified to, to receive that response. Now being an identity event, I, I, for obvious reasons can't reveal their true identity. So under a zero trust code name, I'm gonna say thank you to diamond hyperdrive. You're amazing. You're great teams to work with and yeah, this wouldn't have happened without you. So thank you very much.

And also all zero are long term collaborators in this space. It's yeah. Fantastic to work with you. Thank you very much. Thank you. So congratulations again. The next category has the wonderful long lame enabling access and collaboration along the value chain and to announce the winner. I'm happy to call back on stage this time a woman and it's my colleague and senior Analyst at co call Annie Bailey. Welcome. Speaker 10 00:20:52 So hello everyone. And I'm very pleased to announce the winning project for enabling access and collaboration along the value chain.

But first, what are we really looking for in this category? So this category is honoring the really tangible business goals behind excellent technology rollout, and that would be collaboration. And so it's more important now than ever before to facilitate collaboration and trustworthy interaction along the value chain, B2B and B2C of course. And so seamless and highly secure access are of course, absolute requirements here to support the digitally transformed enterprise and to provide individual and personalized identity services to customers, to employees and to partners anybody.

And so we looked for a balance of flexibility and security here in the different projects that were nominated and flexibility is critical here, of course, to provide for the different requirements of all parties, including regulated industries and role based access management and Federation that supports the support that major authentication standards and applications are what delivers the foundation for secure integration along the whole value chain. And so I'm very pleased to announce that the winner is Swiss calm.

And so let's invite Wolf Houseman to the, Speaker 11 00:22:50 So that looks great. Thank you very much. It's an honor to be here and actually it shouldn't be me here, but it should be. The entire team has done the integration work over the last few years.

For me, it's a pleasure to be here. It's a great event, met vendors, great people, excellent, excellent speeches. But you know, reflecting on the last few years as the complicated names, as it's collaboration, it's identity Federation, we needed to onboard various kinds of clients with requirements, applications. It's the whole stack. And the end, the aim is that the technology works perfectly, but nobody should see the technology, right?

It's just maybe a username, maybe a password in the extreme, but in most cases it's a Federation federated that identity management, just a single sign on solution. And the client doesn't even notice that it changes from the applications that are hosted on their end to someone, to something that Swisscom is providing. Speaker 11 00:23:51 It's so seamless, it's smooth. And that's the great job that the team actually did. So when we started off, of course you have the architecture concept.

And so on, we looked at the requirements and looking back, it's really fun to see that actually it has increased over the time that we needed to deliver. And we were very happy that we selected the right architecture, but also the right vendor.

And we, what I also always call is we selected the kind of Swiss army knife of, of an AAM for me, that's for truck with am and IDs, and it's scaled up it, lift up the expectation. So it's, it's been a good choice and it's been a good journey so far, but it's also continuing into, into the future besides enabling and building a collaboration platform. The team actually also had to go through different transformations in itself. Speaker 11 00:24:45 When we started off, it was a local engineering. Luckily we decided to go in hybrid mode using nearshoring teams.

And it was just the right time because we've covered. And we were actually able to, you know, distribute the team across Europe and collaborate together. At the same time we did the AAM transformation. It's not just that we are building capabilities for our clients. Also from our perspective, we want to bring together multiple stacks, which operated independently into one, stack that in the future, we can actually reduce a lot of cost.

And today already we got rid of three legacy applications and we using similarly for truck and from a savings perspective, from an operation service perspective, this is huge. This helps us really to focus the work on the core platform. Also in terms of building up knowledge, of course, it's been a long road on day one. Speaker 11 00:25:43 We didn't have any for truck knowledge at all. So we looked around for an integration partner and we were very, very happy that we selected IC consult first as a consultancy. And then second as an enabling partner.

And now we are collaborating still with him because we need engineering skills. So now there are our scaling partner. So they lift along the way. And it's great, you know, to have a fun working relationship, which, but also puts, you know, the results to the ground and has continued over the years. So in a couple days, it's back to the office. I'm very happy to take that art back to the team. And I would like to congratulations to them in my words, because I'm just the responsible, I didn't do the work it's there award, and it's really a pleasure that they received it. Thank you very much.

Congratulations. So next category, I am at the scale of the title and I can quickly say welcome back on stage because I want to ask Martin Kuppinger on stage. Please clap your hand together. Okay. This project is about adding identity management, IGA.

In fact, self-services workflows for managing entitlements for managing groups to Microsoft active directory and extending it it to your Microsoft Azure active directory. Okay. You might right now say, okay, this is boring.

No, it isn't in that case. I think that the one thing is really making this, this integrated thing is, is important thing. And by the way, it's always beneficial to add, I I, to, to active director, not just having uncoordinated group management stuff, etcetera, as we see hard for frequently, but what makes this project really stand out as it's big, it's really big. It's a project that has been run on one of the largest, if not the largest active directory globally. And as we can imagine them equally impressively big Azure active directory, it has been run successfully.

It has been deployed successfully. It has been really implemented well in this very, very large environment. And so I know a little bit more about it.

There's, it's really also overall a complex infrastructure behind that. So it's really something, some of these things you really just need to get done and it delivered it delivered by improvements in security and governance. It delivered by improvements in the response time, by very significant improvements in the response time of it, to the requests, they get around access, it delivered in a better quality of service. As I've said in one of the very largest environments, you can do that. And I think this is what also makes a difference, which makes project outstanding to do it at scale.

And so for it's a pleasure for me to announce the winner for the category we've trust simply named IM at scale. And the winner is Siemens. And the representative here is Mr. Leonardo Morales, who's it service manager, team leader, it infrastructure, project manager. Congratulations. That is exciting. Thank you very much. Copy a call for that award. This is my first award in that topic at Simmonds representing, Simmonds very excited getting that in name of Simmonds. And I would like to thank all the Siemens community who supported that project.

The implementational partner, Ana the product vendor in empowered and especially the whole project team who make it a success. I think that is a big step for Siemens driving, have digital transformation and providing services around the globe in the high scale. Thank you very much. Photo That one. Congratulations again. So next up the project that wins next is for the category, very favorable credentials and decentralized identity, and therefore to announce the winner I'd like to ask on stage project manager of copy our call rad HEC day, Speaker 12 00:32:22 Right?

The value of identity is that it comes with purpose and the process of seeing value in something always starts off with a few folks. And what I love about the decentralized identity community is that you have an incredible set of people focused and working on things that they care about. Learning together, iterating together, swinging for the fence is to create something foundational in the world.

And our winner for this year's decentralized identity award does just that as you all might know, the current industry paradigm is well specifically around personal data management is riddled with legal and ethical complexities. Our winner takes a hard look at the identity status quo and is tackling these Tony issues head on to deliver personalized proactive services to its citizens.

Their platform simplifies personal data, access interactions across its wide area of digital services and is distributed privacy mechanism further PA the way for transforming smart cities worldwide, enabling a better life for residents and more importantly, cultivating a sense of belonging, just like EIC ladies and gentlemen, the winner of this year's EIC award for decentralized identity and verifiable credentials is please put your hands together for the city of Helsinki. I'd like to invite Mr.

Miko, Osama chief digital officer of the city of Helsinki Speaker 12 00:34:31 Miko. Okay. Many congratulations. Speaker 13 00:34:34 Okay. Thank you for fine words.

And, and for these great award hope you can hear me now. Well, Speaker 12 00:34:41 Yes we can. Speaker 13 00:34:43 Okay. So great things from the city of health. And unfortunately I cannot be with you, but I'm here at home with wife and three children. So this is also a good place to be. Have you toast for me in the after party?

Anyways, little explain our, our thinking, creating proactive human-centric services for residents is a central theme in our digitalization program. And there are two major paradigm shifts we believe in. So city of health and key is, is transforming from a reactive to proactive service delivery model. And secondly, we are moving from outright exploitation to human-centric uses of data. I don't mean city of Helsinki has been exploiting personal at earlier, but if you think about what so, so media companies have been using with our doing with our personal data. You can call it exploitation.

So we believe that as public, as responsible public servants, we want to show so example on, on how to use data in a human-centric way. Speaker 13 00:35:51 And thus, we have been collaborating with group and the series of all to ensure citizens have a better transparency and better control on how their data is being used.

So we, we, as a city of Helsinki, we see us as a 4runner in building human-centric services in line with so-called my data principles. If you're not familiar with my data, please check, check the webpages.

Anyway, we want to turn this my data declaration into real implementation and, and hope to share our learnings and approach with other other cities. So thank you very much for this award and hope you have a great party, even if I'm not there. So sorry about Speaker 12 00:36:39 Congratulations again, Miko, and we wish you the best of luck on your journey towards reinventing societal infrastructure. Thank you. Speaker 13 00:36:47 Thanks a lot. So last but not least the next category has the name. I am processes and role management.

And therefore I would like to ask, copy our call CEO, battled Cal on stage to announce the winner welcome battle. Speaker 14 00:37:42 The best comes at the end. The key objective of the project, which I have the pleasure to present here was to establish automated control over the identities and accounts and the current status across the entire organization. All employees, all businesses, all countries, all legal entities.

And I think the starting situation was typically for many organizations, no or dysfunctional interfaces to golden sources, such as HR broken legacy processes, often manual inconsistencies. So for example, different approaches taken in different entities or departments of the company and also in different countries. So the clear target was to improve data quality, streamline, and automate identity and access life cycle processes as much as possible. And that's important across the entire firm and as such contribute to more overall efficiency.

For example, with concepts like first day readiness, I think it's very obvious that this project wasn't primarily an IM or a technical challenge. It was first and foremost, also a change management challenge. And I think the achievements at the end are impressive. The scope was enormous 10 plus countries, 50 plus legal entities, 23,000 users, fully automated onboarding based on HR data within link included to the national ID. The automation have reduced operation across significantly. And of course also significant improvement to the overall data. Quality in source systems have been achieved.

And on top of that, this was all achieved mainly with internal resources, Speaker 14 00:40:08 The winner in the category, IAM processes and role management is sweat bank. Can I on stage please? Thank you. Speaker 14 00:40:41 And now I need everybody's help. Can I ask you please to stand up, please stand up. I have one important information to make it's also today, a Catrina's birthday. So I suggest we sing happy birthday two. You happy birthday to you. Happy birthday. Happy birthday two. You Speaker 15 00:41:25 Thank you. It was amazing.

It was such surprise for Speaker 14 00:41:29 Me. Can you just turn around? Speaker 15 00:41:32 Yeah. This is amazing team you Speaker 14 00:41:35 Congratulations.

Yeah, no bang. So this is the internal team which made it all possible over to you. Speaker 15 00:41:46 Yes, you are amazing team. Thank you together. We did it. Yeah. I also want to thank Martin and Matthias because they were supporting us during those five years that we were struggling with this project. I also would like to think my husband because well, rollouts during last year, sometimes I was testing. I don't know, even, even during the night, we together this midnight time. So he was so patient, they were saying to me, you're crazy. Or maybe two times. No.

So he was very patient. And also I want to thank all of you from cooking a call for ranging this event because I'm really proud standing on the stage last years, last two years was, as you know was awful because you couldn't go to a place we wanted to go, but you, you really did impossible for me also doing international event. It's it's really, really something that's currently is just impossible.

And yes, when somebody asked me in few years, well, when was the most extraordinary birthday that you have? Probably it'll be that I wasn't cooking a call conference, getting the, this award I was doing enough. Thank you. Speaker 14 00:43:14 Are you prepared to take a photo? So normally, So congratulations on happy birthday again. Yes. I have no more categories on my tablet. So thank you to you all for staying here.

It was a long day with a lot of input for you and you are now very welcome to join us outside in the expo area and upstairs in the EIC cafe to join our happy, our lounge lounge, happy hour, and we will have a DJ. So if you are in the mood to shake a bit, even the virtual people can join us, just go to the happy hour lounge in the menu bar, and then we will stream the DJ to you at home. So maybe you want to celebrate with us together and with the people worldwide, virtually. I thank you.

And for all of you who are waiting here for the gamification code, it's winning evening, so good luck and good night and see you at a party or tomorrow. Thank you.