A Field of Dreams: Why Vodafone Is Investing $1Bn In A Unified View

Posted on February 22, 2012 by KHaynes

by Nick Crown, Director of Product Marketing

Listening to the Voices
In the film Field of Dreams, a Midwestern farmer is told “If you build it, they will come.” He builds a baseball field on his farm to make this dream come true – in the case of today’s data-driven businesses, customer unification is the baseball field. Albert Hitchcock, Group CIO of Vodafone, described in this video how his company embarked on a billion-dollar IT effort that created a unified view of their customers. To follow the Field of Dreams analogy, Vodafone recognizes that embarking on this unification endeavor will build value that increases over time as the combined view of customer identity data provides unforeseen insight and potential. The point is this: if you invest in the hard work of unifying your customer identity data, you will find myriad opportunities to put that data to use for the benefit of your customers.

A good example of this is a project for a large European cable operator where UnboundID’s technology was originally purchased to provide a consolidated view of customer data for the purpose of providing highly personalized offerings directly to customers while watching television – specifically, the World Cup.  This project has since evolved, and there are now several other projects that are relying on this single unified view of the customer.  One of these projects involves the real-time personalization of the customer’s viewing experience leveraging some of the latest devices available for interactive television.  Another involves providing visibility into customer orders for services prior to the actual provisioning of the service, which is helping them to reduce the overall cost of operations.  Neither of these opportunities was envisioned prior to the delivery of the initial targeted marketing project.

Why it is important to Vodafone?
As Albert stated in the video, once Vodafone has the data consolidated from the various service offerings, they can start combining it with some of the real-time data from their network operations (location, presence) and demographic data available from customer relationship management systems.  It’s this unique combination of the customer’s static profile and service data, dynamic network data, and derived demographic data that creates the opportunity to dramatically improve and personalize the customer experience.  One of the first benefits enabled is the ability to understand which services customers have purchased.  This may seem so elementary for those that have not worked with large service providers like Telcos that have grown their offerings – and silos of customer data – over decades, but this problem is fairly common.  But it’s not just stodgy old Telcos that are challenged with this.  Google’s primary justification for their recent move to a master privacy policy is so that they can provide more personalized offerings and a better customer experience based on the unification of customer data.  Sound familiar?  My favorite point from this video is when Albert said “…real-time location-based information combined with some deep understanding of customer behavior enables a whole range of new capabilities that we probably haven’t even thought of.”  Exactly!

Why it is important to UnboundID?
We believe that before companies can extract value locked away in their customer data, they first need to create a single unified view of their customers across their various services and offerings.  The Netflix/Qwikster debacle last fall is a great example of how important this is to the overall customer experience, and what happens when this is done poorly.  And when you take into consideration the opportunities that allow companies to harness data to improve not only their own services, but also the services of other companies, you realize the importance of unifying this data.

Identity information has been coined the “new oil” of the information economy. But before that raw material can be harnessed as an enabler, currency, or product, it must first be located, extracted, and unified into a repository where it can be efficiently utilized.  Sometimes it will be utilized to provide access to services and products for customers; other times it will be used to highly personalize those same services and offerings; while at other times it will be exchanged with third parties to enhance their services and offerings.   Whatever the case may be for the value provided by this data, it will not come unless you first build the unified view.

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Get the experts on your side

Posted on February 14, 2012 by KHaynes

by Kami Haynes, Marketing Manager

The fate of your customers’ identity data rests in your company’s collective hands. And when you’re making big decisions about how to use that identity data, you want to be sure that you have gathered all the background information you need to make the right decision – both for your company, and for your customers.

So you turn to the experts – the analysts whose third-party opinions are validation for your decision. The same analysts who follow the trends, watch the markets, see the pitfalls, and identify the vendors who are making a mark. Analysts like Gartner and Ovum, both of whom have named UnboundID as a vendor of note.

In their April report, Gartner named UnboundID as a “Cool Vendors in Identity and Access Management”, and now Ovum has recognized UnboundID in their “On the Radar” report.

Ovum recognizes the bigger players in the market, but calls out UnboundID as a start-up company with a promising product line and a management team with a strong heritage in IAM.

“UnboundID has healthy and growing relationships with tier-1 communication service providers in North America and Canada. It has reported greater than 100% year-on-year revenue growth every year since its inception, and reports a healthy pipeline of prospects. The company is focused on tapping opportunities arising from the need for telcos and cloud service providers to have a “centralized identity,” by building a platform on the foundation of UnboundID’s carrier-grade directory services products.

UnboundID believes that the growth of cloud, social, and mobile computing will force a dramatic shift towards simplification in how user information is managed, secured, and exposed, and that its management’s experience in this area gives it a strong competitive advantage .”
Ovum: On the Radar – by Shagun Bali

These are the kinds of endorsements that can help solidify your position and reduce risk as you make decisions that affect your company and your customers. Get the experts on your side, and find out why experts like Ovum think that UnboundID can help you improve customer service, increase revenue, and keep your customer data secure.

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Are You Ready for Your Attribute Worlds to Collide?

Posted on February 8, 2012 by KHaynes

by Trey Drake, Architect

If I had to pick a theme for the IIW Satellite event in D.C. just a couple weeks ago, it would be attributes, attributes, and more attributes.  Topics ranged from attribute governance to monetization of attributes to privacy for attributes to slinging attributes around. In other words, all things attribute.

What is an attribute, you may ask?  It’s tough to nail down a definition, given its overloaded use, though for the purposes of this post I’ll call an attribute “A permanent or transient claim or fact about a person.”  For the purposes of this post, we’ll leave out the monetization of attributes and cover that in another post. For now, let’s talk attribute governance and privacy.

In the enterprise context, the “person” aspect is largely ignored, with the exception of proofing.  Each individual person signs an I9, employment contract, and a litany of other agreements enabling the enterprise to utilize and store those attributes wherever they see fit. Obviously, those attributes (which comprise a person’s identity) should be protected, but how do you know that they will be?  You’re expected to trust, but how do you verify that the trust is warranted?

Let’s contrast that scenario with the consumer space.  There (at least in theory) you’re the customer and should be able to pick and choose which attributes you choose to reveal and you should know how those attributes are managed, monetized or exchanged. This topic has been covered comprehensively, even by our own blog and, in my opinion, this level of privacy is well-covered via the User Managed Access spec, or UMA.  The latest revision of the UMA spec looks interesting, since it introduces a concrete scheme for managing resources and associated permissions.  Could it provide an answer for people-managed enterprise attributes as well?

Recognizing that the enterprise and consumer spaces are very different spaces, we must assume that inevitably the worlds will collide unless, of course, you’re George.  “Ya gotta keep your worlds apart”…George said, or…”They blow up.  It’s just common sense!”  Or is it?  As OAuth2 (and likely OpenIdConnect, too) pushes into the enterprise, and consumer applications face increasing demands for increased governance, risk and compliance coverage, these worlds are looking more alike every day.

It’s interesting to chat amongst peers about the abstract, but who’s actually talking specifics and then executing on them? The folks at UMA/Kantara Initiative, Open Identity Exchange (OIX), and the OpenID Foundation come to mind,..  As a company founded on building an Identity Services Platform, designed to tackle the hard problems of identity-at-scale, we intend to be a problem-solver when worlds collide.  If the world doesn’t “blow up” by May, I look forward to more aaa (that’s attributes, attributes, attributes!) discussions at IIW #14.

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Privacy of Personal Identity Data – It’s a Simple Equation

Posted on February 1, 2012 by KHaynes

by Andy Land, Vice President of Marketing

Last week I wrote about identity information as the product.  In this post, I am following up with two more interesting happenings.

  1. Google Changing Its Privacy Policy
  2. Facebook and the European Commission Facing Off (Pun Intended) Over Privacy of Personal Data

These stories drive home what I previously mentioned: that identity information is extremely valuable.  Google and Facebook thrive on monetizing identity information, which makes our friends in government worried (see Congressional response to Google in the US and the European Commission mentioned above).  Thus, it might seem that the privacy around identity information is a matter of opinion.  On one side we have the vendors making money off of it, who want the identity data to flow more freely, and on the other side we have the government, worried about the consequences to our society.

These stories bring up one of the core dilemmas in technology  – open vs. secure (or in this case, private).  Security professionals have struggled with this dilemma since the first corporate networks started.   As my colleague Nick Crown says, “convenience wins.”  We’re seeing that today in the enterprise, as IT is learning to deal with devices they previously did not support, plus lots of cloud-based applications.  In the consumer world, the choice for all of us is: do we want to give up the privacy of our data in exchange for convenience?  With the success of the social networking services, it seems as if many of us are voting “yes”.

Does it have to be this way?  As I mentioned in my previous post, I believe we can make this economy around identity information even bigger and more successful if we can involve the user in an open, transparent fashion in the sharing of identity information.  At UnboundID, our vision for identity information is for the information to be used to grow the overall economy while respecting the user’s desires around privacy.  We believe knowledge gained via trust generates user loyalty.  User loyalty equals more revenue for vendors, who create fans and advocates for their brands and products, and in the process create a better product experience for users overall.  We believe this new economy can be a win-win for users and vendors.

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Identity Information: You Are the Product

Posted on January 25, 2012 by KHaynes

by Andy Land, Vice President of Marketing

I recently read a very interesting article from AdWeek titled, “Whose Life Is It Anyway? Consumers are learning their data is currency and new companies are betting they can help them cash in.” There were several interesting points in the article that stood out to me:

Identity Information is fundamental to business: Identity and the sharing of our personal data is already a multi-billion dollar business.

Identity Information is the “new oil”:  All buying and selling relies on a human to make a purchase decision. Knowledge of the human gives sales a leg up, thus identity information becomes highly valuable. Users must see value in sharing their information – if not, it can become a scarce commodity.

The User Is Not Explicitly In the Value Chain:  Currently, the user is being treated as an afterthought. However, companies and services are being created that address the needs of the customer by helping them manage their digital identity and become part of the value chain.

With those interesting points in mind, I’ve been thinking about the role of identity in our world, and I see three critical roles that identity will play in the flow of commerce:

  1. Identity as the Enabler – Identity information will enable new products and services that a company can launch and monetize.  Richer, more personalized products will ultimately be created.
  2. Identity as the Currency – Identity information will become a form of currency as users offer up their identity information in exchange for value.
  3. Identity as the Product:  Identity information will be what is bought and sold just like we sell products today. Companies will build businesses around brokering identity information.

As identity becomes more and more important to commerce, Identity Management professionals will need to look differently at their role in the ecosystem. They will need to become active participants that help all members of the value chain receive value in a trustworthy way. The goal should be to make the ecosystem open, transparent, and highly valuable to all parties. The current market around the buying and selling of identity information seems very shadowy, and it seems that users are duped into giving away their valuable identity information without a clearly articulated value. I hope this scenario changes and I feel hopeful when a business like Commonwealth Bank in Australia clearly states that if you share your personal data, they will give you monetary benefits.

We are entering a brave new era where all kinds of new products and services will be specifically tailored to the wants and needs of the user.  This highly personalized world can only happen if we get all the key constituents aligned and working as trusted partners.

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