KC Virtual Awards

Yes. Now we have an agenda point that is very special, like any already set. And we are coming now to our award ceremony today. We have the Casey life award on the category category. I am in digital transformation and it was not an easy, yeah, easy thing to choose between that huge number of great projects. But we have one winner and to announce this one winner, I would welcome our Analyst lead Analyst, Matthias Reinwarth back. Hi Matthias. Hi Jenny.

So nice panel again, but now other topic before we start, and before you tell us about the winner and the project, of course, I have three questions for you. The first one is which role does I am for digital transformation play in connection with our topic today, customer identity and marketing automation.

Yeah, I think that's an, an easy answer because without the, without a trusted identity and in the ideal world, a single trusted identity for all of your people slash devices slash processes that you have in place as a prerequisite, you cannot start on the road to a digital transformation. So IAM is, is, is a core element and it's it, it provides security, but it also, as, as we had in the panel before, it really is the basis for this customer journey to make sure that what a customer does is well understood and handled in a way that he likes it to be.

So yes, it, there is a strong connection. And of course I am for digital transformation is a, is a must.

Yeah, absolutely. So next question is what type of project qualifies for this?

Yeah, for this what category I am in digital transformation, There, there actually are quite a few very different types of projects that really enable this digital transformation. When we look at IAM, it could be just a single small adding the cm component to an existing IAM world. It could have also be improving processes for, for onboarding applications, to such a digital, a digital transformation platform.

So many organizations really struggle with getting quicker in getting their new applications, the new websites just on the road, because it just takes time to have this onboarded to an existing IAM. Sometimes it's just even consolidation, making sure that you have all identities in one place. It could be many of those, but, but all of the, I am for digital transformation processes and projects look very much like that, making the life better for either the customer or the partner or for it. Okay.

And before a hand over completely to you, just one more, we always say we award outstanding projects in our cut toes. What makes a project outstanding for you In general projects are outstanding. First of all, when they are in budget, when they are in time, when they deliver what they promise, maybe even over deliver really great pro projects, save money and improve functionality at the same time and, and for IAM for digital transformation.

Of course, it's very important to understand that making sure that the IM system is as performant as, as scalable as, as, as, as good enough as international enough as required. That is really an important aspect. So outstanding can be defined in, in many, in many different di dimensions, but, but those were a few of those, I think.

Okay, perfect. Thank you for that. And we are now very curious, who is the winner of today's award, the status, right?

So, and this is also unusual for me. First of all, I have an, I have really a piece of paper to read the Ladia. And the second is that I have been sent this envelope where the winner is, but I think we also will have some, some shiny electronic presentation for the winner then. So I first tried to read out my notation to start with so key requirements for a successful digital transformation strategy are all aspects of agility, usability, security, and compliance.

Digital identities are at the center of interest in digital transformation and the ability to unify identities and control everyone's access to any service is key for companies in their transformation, strategies, enterprises, and their management are challenged by the need for continuous innovation in both technology and business models, as well as by the pervasive transformation of business partnerships and internal organizations.

In fact, no company can afford to wait long for the introduction for off the next application for employees or even for customers and different technical solutions for individual I individual identity types silos prevent rapid innovation in order to boost this digital transformation. This can require putting existing landscapes, architectures, even IAM landscapes to the test, and it can mean consolidating and comprehensively modernizing them.

The following characteristic describe the success of today's awarded project, and I'm almost done a single uniform concept for all types of identities required for a global enterprise fast application onboarding compliance with current onboarding standards, a high degree of automation, the consolidation of a range of identity silos into one set of unified services and the provision of this single IAM service itself as an integrated part of state-of-the-art software development and deployment concepts.

So it is a uniform modern and scalable identity infrastructure for a truly international corporation. Now, this is the all in the sentence. The winner is This works Right.

So, and I hope the same is on my card. It is the best I am for digital transformation. Project is BMW and I'm pleased and happy to welcome Maya he's solution architect, web access management.

Hi, Mr. Maya. Hello everybody. I'm happy to be here. Great to have you. So if all this is true that I mentioned, I hope so it's really creating one six single set of identities for BMW, a worldwide international corporation, but to get more into, into more detail, first of all, congratulations, but What, What are the key objectives of this project?

Where, where did you start it out? Well, yes, you already mentioned it.

One of, one of our key objectives was consolidating several and multiple IAM solutions we had at BMW. Just give me, let me, let me give you some more details.

So our, our in our, in the, in our past the, the, our old infrastructure was separated for example, by technology. So we had different software products for Sam and, or for example. So what we had to do in the background is somehow to interconnect these, these software products so that we build a huge single sign on context over these technologies, or they were separated by groups of users.

For example, we had different systems for customers for BMW dealers and for BMW employees, which was a pain in the, as for all the application developers, because if the application was used by an employee and a customer, for example, or an BMW dealer, they had to interact with different identity providers. So that was a real pain for our, our application developers. And it was even, we had a separation amongst the different BMW companies, for example, BMW automotive and the BMW bank.

So the consequence was that the users had, if they used bank application and automotive application, they had to log in twice with different accounts and different passwords due to different password policy. So with this one IDP strategy, we managed to set up a central yeah. Identity provider for, for all the BMW web applications. And I'm happy to, to, to tell you that, that we used the, for software stack for, for that solution. That was a great choice for us in our opinion. And we had our implementation partner, I see consult with us.

They did all the implementation work and, and they helped us a lot here. So. Okay.

So, yeah. Okay.

So No, no. So, so you mentioned already the, the, the product, so the product stack is clear and you mentioned different IDPs for Sam and ol and, and open ID connect before.

So what, what the technologies that are now the foundation for this one IDP strategy? Well, from, from the application perspective, well, we offer OLS and open ID connect. We still offer Samil.

Of course, we still have lots of family applications. We use the for web agents for, for the, I always say traditional web applications still use the web agents. And for some use cases, we also offer still basic of, for clients, which are not able of ORs, for example. And what's quite new for us is now we are able to offer, I always say, say real machine to machine communication. So thes machine to machine flows, which yeah. Which we were not able to offer in the past from the user perspective.

Well, it's just the, the login functionality. So different login levels. So username, password, or mobile post UBI key. So that's the technologies for the user and internally the, the whole four stack is, is hosted on Linux virtual machines. And we have a C I C D pipeline to, for, for our automated yeah. Development and deployment. We have yeah. Fully automated test. So each of each deployment we do also in our productive environment is fully automated tested first, before we really set life. For example, we have an Azure tenant, which we use for tests.

We, we perform from the internet to our solution. So we do that from the national cloud tenant and most important for us. We have a self-developed self-service yeah, that's, it's basically con consisting of, of first APIs and the front end. And this service service is where office application developers to onboard their applications and it's fully automated. So there is no ticket or manual tasks in the back end. That sounds, that sounds great. So you mentioned one, or I mentioned one concept for all identities.

So it's really from the customer to the employee, from the partner to the bank employees. So it's really one concept for all. Yeah. Yeah.

So that, for us, it was important to, to, to, to have that because yeah, of course we wanted to generate a seamless user experience for, for, for, for the customers. And of course, for all the other end users we have.

So, but also we wanted to, to yeah. Bring extra value or value to, to, to the application developers, because as I mentioned, they had to, to deal with different identity providers, which was really yeah. A pain in the air for them.

And, and you can imagine you're talking about something around 1500 web applications using our services. So yeah, the, the, the costs, they are, they, you have to multiply them by 1500. So this is a tremendous amount of, of costs we're talking about. Right.

So, so I mentioned that that in perfect projects really also save money. That is true for you as well.

Yes, it is. So for example, application onboarding in the past, it took us, it was a yeah. Semi automated, highly manual process. It took us 10 to 15 days until this. Yeah. An application has been onboarded and worked. And now with the, with our service service, this is done within one day and it fully automated.

So, so, so no one has, yeah. Has to do perform, perform any manual tasks, which from our internal perspective, save us operational effort. And now we have more capacity for topics like solution build, for example. Great.

Yeah, that sounds really good. So I, I think that is one main learning.

If you, is there another one main learning that you would like to share with our participants today, so really to take away that you learned during the lifetime of that project? Well, I, I would, I would mention two. Yeah. The first one is we should have done that earlier. Yeah. So we realized we should have done that way earlier. And the second one is when this project started BMW's cloud strategy was not that far, that we could use it for such a critical infrastructure, which of course had some drawbacks for us.

So now yeah, this, this, we can use BMW cloud strategy and we, we plan to use it because of, of course, that will, will save money. Give us the, the, the scalability brings us several technologies out of the box, which we had to take care of our own in the past. So if possible, I would yeah. Recommend to use cloud technology for that. And that brings me, me to the, to the, if I'm allowed to say to the next thing, the next big thing for BMW is bringing that into the cloud.

Having it installed in multiple cloud environments, spread all over the world, for example, us Europe and Asia Pacific, and still stick to this one IDP strategy. So it must be possible that if a user locks in, in, for example, in the us using a us application, and then he wants to use an Europe application, which is connected to our Europe instance, it still must be a single sign. So that will be the next challenge for us in the next, next big thing. Okay. Maybe we talk again at, at such a, at such a occasion.

So a few, would you like to add anything further? Would you like to thank somebody the final minutes are now ready for you?

Well, of course you can imagine that I didn't do that on my own. So there was, there was a BMW internal teams I'd like to thank all my colleagues, which, which helped participated in that project and helped making that, that happen. I'm only the representative today. And of course, and that's, for me really important. I really like to thank the two partners we had here. One is IC consult, as they already mentioned for implementation. They really did a great job and they, they consulted us in architectural things like that. And that was really, really helpful.

And of course, I also like to thank for shop because yeah, in my opinion, they do not only have an, an, an excellent software product. They also supported us with their knowledge and with their experience in a project. And they really brought in a big value into that project. So thank you very much to all of you. Great. Thank you very much. That's it. From my side, we are perfectly in time, which is also good. So congratulations, again, really reads like a perfect IM project to me. Thank you again, Abba. Thank you. Thank you very much.