Experian

Barry Libenson:  Experian is a global corporation. We're made up of four different lines of business: That's credit services, consumer services, decision analytics, and marketing services. We have been the largest credit bureau for quite some time, operating in many different regions of the world.

Experian used to be more of a pure information company. I would say we've become much more of a technology company and a data company over the last several years. Whether it's building out mobile platforms, whether it's building things in the cloud, technology really is a critical partner now to the business, and how we make decisions around what we build from a technology perspective. And my group is very critical to ensuring that we have the right standards in place, that the organization has the right set of tools to use so that we can build products in a consistent way. So that's one of the reasons why we standardized on Okta's platform, so that all of the lines of business, for internal and external use, would have an identity management platform that would be ubiquitous for the company. Those are the kinds of strategies that we're putting in place so that we don't end up with a fragmented architecture, and everybody going off in a different direction.

Mervyn Lally:  I'm getting rid of six different technologies. That's six different support contracts, that's six different types of servers that I have to maintain, patch, maintain vulnerabilities or zero vulnerabilities on. So all of that moves away from ... my environment becomes easier to manage, and now I go to identity as a service, where I'm just acquiring that service, and those components are taken care of by Okta. The efficiency of being able to on-board users, being able to on-board customers, being able to on-board consumers, the efficiency to get there makes us as an organization more efficient. It makes our employees more productive, because now they can get to their applications quicker than what they could in the past.

We want to learn fast as we deploy the environment and we bring it up, configure it, and test. As our teams went through that, our team kind of struggled at the beginning because it was foreign to them. To be able to spin up and down a new application really quickly was something that they were not used to, and it's kind of nice to see now that they've become comfortable with it, watching the speed and the acceleration happen as we do the deployment.

Barry Libenson:  Just like Experian is trying to innovate with the solutions that we provide to our customers, our customers are trying to innovate the solutions that they're building for their customers, and the types of technology that we're talking about, whether it's API enablement, or authentication, having good tools and allowing them to do the kinds of things the way they want to do them, rapidly accelerates their ability to innovate. And so they can products to market faster if we can provide them with the types of solutions that they're looking for. Okta will be, and is, the go-forward strategy for all authentication, and will be the single standard that we use, so it will be very impactful for everything we build going forward.