Building Blocks for the Ultimate Guest Experience at MGM Resorts

Scott Howitt:  IT, itself, is going through a transformative time right now, and we don't know what the future will hold. We just know that IT is going to move a heck of a lot faster, and Okta is one of the things that I can put in my toolkit to say, "Hey, we're going tomove faster because we have this identity component nailed." What we're seeing is more of the technology that we're doing, both in within our data centers and within the organization itself, is moving to the cloud. So we have a whole lot of issues with: how do we provision that to the cloud? How do we make sure that we have the right guidelines around what we do? And it's an ever-changing standard within that technology, as well. We don't necessarily do identity as well as we would like, so we were really looking for somebody who was a leader in that space.

Our initial deployment of Okta was about 62,000 associates. We brought them over on to our HR system, and got them up and going. Then we had two or three other small little cloud apps that we wanted topull over, as well. We tested it out. Within a few weeks, we had it up and going. It was pretty flawless. When I really saw the power of what we're doing here, I thought, "Wow. We really need to explore what we're doing with these guys further."

We talked about not just provisioning out to our own internal associates, but I think, as we move down the road, what we want to use is Okta to help us to facilitate our M life program, which is our loyalty program for all our patrons. So the task for us with all those M life members is in the millions. Most identity and access management systems weren't build for that kind of scale. They were build to be in-house solutions with, maybe, hundreds of thousands of users at their max. Okta gives us the ability to go out and say, "Hey, can we have millions of users and it manage your identity well?"

Everything that we will do in the future is all about delivering a personalized experience and making sure that, hey, I understand who this person is and know that everything that I have about them is right. Because it makes for a more inspiring experience, and that's really what we're looking to deliver to the people who come and visit our properties. And the cornerstone of personalization is identity management.