DISH Network

John Swieringa:  I think we're at a nexus point today for how people are integrating technology into their lives. We live in a world where people expect to download an app from the App Store and their life gets immediately better. And I think for many of us that are on this journey, we need these types of seamless technologies and ways to integrate what we do, whether it's at work, personally, otherwise, into just our everyday lives and how we go about doing things.

Dish has always been a pioneering and innovative company, throughout our 35 year history. And none of that has changed around here. New projects are crossing our desk everyday and as we look to have foundational services that bring to bear to bring new projects and solutions to market, it's important that we have an independent proprietor for identity services that treats our other partners equally.

We got involved with Okta a little more than a year ago. We sensed an emerging trend with our employees and as well with some of our partners that we're more disparate, different kinds of technology into our enterprise processes. We're about a year into our journey; it's going well. We've got about 15 applications up and running with about one coming every week. Our initial implementation was for our core knowledge workers of about 5000. We're working right now to onboard all of our technicians, so as we look at our next wave of Okta roll outs, we see a big role for Okta, to continue to power how we authenticate the usage of our content, our tools. We see our ability to do that as being far further ahead than we thought we were.

One of the things that sold us on our relationship with Okta was is that we could really become self-sufficient with the tool very quickly. We're able to handle most of that work in-house. I mean, obviously if we need to pick up the phone and make a phone call, our partner's there for us, but it's empowerment for us and our team to be able to bring these services to our customers.

I think the role of the CIO is involving. Today, in my role, it's my job to make sure that we're focused on those bigger things. Whether that's how we bring the next major device partner for Sling TV to market, or whether that's how we deliver more smart home services inside our customers' homes, and that as we go to execute on technology, that we make that really simple and not a barrier for us to be successful.

Technology is not something that is an outcome unto of itself. What it's really there for is to help create productivity and create outcomes in our business. And we've seen that.