Bazaarvoice

Michel Mongeau:  Bazaarvoice is a software, is a service company that creates a network between brands and retailers, and offers a platform to collect, display, and gain insights from consumer-generated content. The technology changes that we're seeing today allow us to leverage more cloud technologies, meaning that we can scale more effectively at a lower cost as well, making sure that our availability stays up. We sometimes do more than a few billion page impressions a day, so for us, the concept of infrastructure is critical to our business.

We face some security challenges at Bazaarvoice to ensure the security of our clients data, so there's personally-identifiable information that we need to store regionally to respect regulations and laws across the different countries. One of our primary systems that clients use is a client portal where they gain access to things like the ratings and reviews that people write. The system is really the core of proving value to our clients. We started using Okta internally a few years ago to create a single sign-on experience for our own employees.

When we started looking at solutions to centralize identities, we wanted to make sure that we hit a few key features in functionality, and one of them was a security of the data. Availability was number two, but only because security is always number one, scalability being the third. We need to make sure that as we do grow our business, we go from 10,000 users to, say, 40,000 users, we need to ensure that the system who's managing our identities can support that type of scaling. We wanted to make sure that we kept focus on our core solution, and then buy a technology that we could easily integrate with to make sure that we can benefit from the core attributes of an identity provider.

At Bazaarvoice, we're using Okta as an identity store and also as an authentication mechanism. So, we're using their universal directory to store all of the users and their attributes, and we're also leveraging their authentication process to make sure that the people who are signing in are who they say they are. Authenticity is one of the key pillars at Bazaarvoice. We need to ensure that whatever is published in terms of consumer-generated content is accurate and is authentic. Because we've now connected the internal implementation of Okta with the external implementation, we can now log in seamlessly between the internal to the external applications that we provide.