Oktane18: Ushering the Enterprise into the Future of Work

Alex: All right everyone. Thank you for being here, especially because this guy is speaking very shortly after me, and the good news is I already talked to Barack, and he said, "Alex, do me a favor, open up for me, warm up the crowd and send them all over to my session, so they'll be all ready to go."

So, given that, you picked the right room to be in for the next 45 minutes. And we hope to not disappoint you with that. I'm real excited to be here. My name is Alex DiNunzio, the Director of Product at Fuze, been with the company for close to 10 years as crazy as that is these days, and I'm responsible of our core platform so that's the voice side of things as well as onboarding infusers and being an Okta customer ourselves, onboarding, helping onboard Okta inside of our own ecosystem as well as the relationship between Okta and Fuze. So, I have the honor of hosting this panel for you today.

But, we're not hear just to talk about that. We're here to talk about some cool research we've been doing and, on your chairs, or the chair next to you, a copy of what I'm about to show you today is there. It's this Workforce Futures doc. I'll show you that in just one second. But, Fuze spends a lot of time trying to understand the leaders of IT across the world. We've done research with CIO's, IT Leaders, Directors, professionals, workers and just recently, two weeks ago, we released a brand new report. It's called The Workforce Futures and this report was 66 hundred workers across nine countries. And our idea was to try to figure out what of the thing we've all been hearing about? The trends about millennials, the generationer’s, and this app group that, "Oh my God they're going to kill the workforce." What if that was actually true? What were people actually seeing? What were workers actually demanding? And we put that into this report, again, sitting next to you.

My goal today is not to go through the whole entire thing. I just needed to give you a quick intro to it so that way Andy and Herminia can help talk about what it means inside of their organizations but I do want to highlight a few key trends.

The first is which, is called, work as a service. Second one is, world as your office. And then, The employ me trend and what does that mean. 

So, let's get into the first one, work as a service. The last ten years has been a pretty fundamental shift in work. I think people think of work no longer as, what we do. It's more of ... and not like where we are, it's kind of ... it becomes and embodiment of who we are and ... did I just lose you? Cool, there we go ... people want to work, when they want to work, where they want to work. So, this first piece of of the work as a service trend is switching on your work mode. I'm a dad of two, soon to be a dad of three and I can tell you that being at home with the kids, it's really hard to get work done but as soon as that nap time hits, in between one and two thirty when I'm working from home, that's like the golden hour. Don't interrupt me I'm putting in my earphones, I'm going to work. Whether that's a meeting or something else. I'm sure all of you have an equivalent of that in your own lives. That's something that this data shows. 

Second one, the appeal from, working from anywhere, this one is pretty self-explanatory but more and more what we're seeing is the conversations from the airport, on the road, here at the conference, "Oh man I have five minutes between sessions." That working from anywhere appeal is real.

And final, the project economy, what the highlight of this one is basically like the world is changing from a series of having permanent employees on the staff, healthcare, and it's something where you have teams of people that are coming together and breaking apart to help solve a problem and these employees that are doing this are mixed with contractors and kind of independent workers who are kind of coming in to help run these projects and these teams come together and what is that end up looking like? It looks like 95% of people of the 66 hundred that we interviewed said, "Work-life balance is important to them," of course I would expect that, 89% though, flexible working should be how we work and not a benefit. 

Think about that, that's nine out of ten people that says this is just what we expect to happen. Not the other way around of, "Oh wouldn't it be nice if there was a work from home policy every once in a while? Or some flexibility in this office?" No, they're going to come into your place of employment and they're going to say, "I expect to be able to have some flexibility. And if you don't have that maybe I don't want to come work for you."

So, is that something that you're thinking about inside your organization? I'm going to leave you to think about that. And, 73% of employees work outside of their contracted work hours. That's pretty staggering, so three out of four people, whether it's working from the couch in the evening or my example of nap time with the kids, or maybe on the weekends, three out of four people are going to work outside of those hours. 

The second, the world is your office. So, the role of kind of the physical office is changing. I mean if I polled the room of how many people have, inside of their own offices, adapted their spaces for things like huddle rooms and small collaboration spaces versus physical offices for executives and director level people throughout org I bet you many of you have already undergone some shift in the physical space within your office. And I think the other thing is gone are the days where your forced to show up, in an office, and that's the expectation every single day for the duration of your career. I mean there are certain things, you can't really be a teacher and work from home as easily as you can inside maybe an office environment. But, for the most part, it's up to you to figure out where you're going to get your work done. 

So, what we see is that while I don't expect that the millions of square footage of office spaces are just going to "poof" disappear overnight, I do expect there to be some significant changes, further than what we've seen today, happening. And this is something that's also pretty real for you to keep an eye on. So, 53% of people work from the company office, every working day. I have some other stats here, which is that while 97% of workers currently work from a company office, at least some of the time, so that's pretty staggering, 97% work, 93% choose. They would want to continue to work in the office, just not full time in the office. 

So, is the office space something that has to go away? No, the office space just has to change. 93% of people would say, "Give me the office as an option. Being social and understanding who I work with and those relationships is incredibly important but I just don't want to be there every day. I find that the distractions ..." Herminia were talking about that earlier today. "The distractions of people coming to my office means I can't write the report that I'm looking to do. I can't file that patent. I can't do that particular thing. Go ahead, I'm going to work from home that day. But, for the rest of the time let me be social with my colleagues." But, that 20% number wish to walk from the office every working day, one out of five people. That's pretty low. Is your office place that people want to go? And I'm not debating whether your Snap wall is good enough if your ice coffee that you have on tap is the thing that people want to drink but you should start to think about these things. If, peoples tendencies are to say, "I want to come to the office. I just don't know for how long," better make it a decent place for people to come to get their work done. 

And the third one is the employ me. This one there's a lot or research in the pamphlet, the packet and I would suggest you read this in a little bit of detail, but machine learning and AI, these are real, these are not just trends. These are things that are changing the way we fundamentally work. I think what's important is that people aren't as scared as I would have thought before reading the research. People aren't as scared about technology eradicating their job or removing the thing that they know how to do. I think what you see is that people are actually excited about the thoughts of AI helping them do their job and getting rid of the stuff they don't want to do. 

The menial tasks. The repetitive nature of what they do. Oh, man scheduling and appointment with 20 people, trying to coordinate those calendars, that's one of my worst parts of my job. Okay, if that can go away and I can just start the meeting that's pretty cool. So, employ me, this particular trend, is about taking advantage of these ... this important set of technological innovation that's coming and putting it to work inside of your office. 

This is a bit different here but I wanted to show you this because I think it's really important. What we're looking at here is when we asked people why they want to work flexibly as it tries to employ me, it's just employing me and the fact that I'm decent at building... it's about employing me as a human being and 43% for better health and kind of wellbeing so think of that as your work-life balance, 37% take care of familial responsibilities. That's like me, taking care of my kids when I'm working from home. And look at the last one, 14% to look after pets. If you just combine the 37 and the 14 you're at 51%. So, one out of every two people cares for a pet or a family and they want to work from home in be able to do that. That's a lot of people. And I imagine that that number's probably even higher in some spaces than others and depending on the age of your employees and where they are in their family life, maybe that changes over time, but those are some pretty important things to keep in mind.

So, what you need is a way for your employees to be able to do this. Be able to work when they want to work, from where they want to work, and so you need technology to facilitate that. And, that's where Fuze comes into play. 

So, Fuze is unified communications platform. You can think of us as a platform that replaces your traditional PBX, how you make phone calls globally. Replacing your kind of singular video products, maybe like a BlueJeans or a Zoom. Replacing your messaging platforms like Slack or HipChat and maybe your like WebEx and GoToMeeting for conferences, and putting them all in one application. And, I think what's really important about this, and I'm going to get into the advantage of having one application, just a second, is that your employees need to have a similar experience regardless of where they are. Regardless of what device they're on. Regardless of how they want to work that day. Low bandwidth, from the beach. 

Oh man, how great is it if your employer wants to check in, well maybe it's not great, but your employer wants to check in for email while they're on vacation. Maybe you should punish him for that, you should probably take a vacation every once in a while. But, if they want to do that and they can jump on a quick call from video and kind of be present for that hour then disassociate after that, that's a pretty powerful thing to be able to do.

And, if you can do that in your application while silencing all the noise that's even better. So, that kind of where Fuze comes into play. But, the keys to that, it's on one platform. And that one platform means that we, not in a scary big brother way, but we know what your employees are doing. We know when they're engaging. We know when they send messages and we can tell you the number of meetings, the quality of these meetings. We can tell you how they're interacting with each other, with your customers. So, that means we're generating a ton of data. And that data looks something like this. 250 million profiles you could say, are inside of our system. These are people or interactions that have happened within the platform. These 250 million people interact with 30 million external users per month which is basically five billion transactions which generates a petabyte of communications data. That's a lot of data. 

All right, so we're not a data conference here but I think the beauty is to try to figure out what do you do with this data as it pertains to the trends I was showing you earlier on. So, let's just flash back for a second. I want to make sure people can work where they want to work, how they want to work, when they want to do that and I'm sitting on this treasure trove of data. So, I need to understand, are my people engaged? Are they happy? Are they going to leave? If they're remote, are they actually doing what they're supposed to? Think about Yahoo boomeranging back and forth between you're allowed to work from home and you’re not allowed to work from home. I bet you most companies represented here, if I just quick poll, whose kind of boomeranged back and forth between the thoughts of do I want to flexible policy or not? Yeah, there's some fingers raised, so that's good. 

It's a challenge and whether you've thought about it now or not that will be something to think about in the future. And, so I just want to make that a little bit more concrete with one example and then a couple pain points that see, experience, but the chart on the left shows Fuze actually interacting with one of our customers. And in this case we have a pretty efficient use of interaction. So this is three or four people as represented by the bigger nodes and the darker colors, interacting with this particular customer. If, Natalie, who's the one that you can see in the lower section, kind of were to leave Fuze or go on vacation or something like that, there's a pretty fair distribution of other people that can interact with that customer. I could tell you by looking at each of these nodes and the names where they are located, how they interact. Maybe they interact more directly with Andy, for some reason. I can figure that out. But, if you look at the chart on the right side, it's kind of inefficient flow. Whoa, what happens if that node in the top left of that second chart disappears?

What happens if that was a person and they disappear? All of the sudden, I think that customer interaction might be in a little bit of trouble. Is that employ happy? Where do they work from? If this was a chart of your own internal workers, why are so many people, kind of, on the outside of this chart and why are there just a few key people internally? 

So, we can answer all these questions for you, but the beauty is that over time we will be able to help you answer the questions relative to your business. So, being that most of us here are in IT, I just want to end on the slide a little bit about ... 

What does this cost from a pain perspective? So, maybe there is only one thing here you latch onto, and that's great because I think this panels will be able to talk to these in detail about their own organization. 

Maybe it's cost. Maybe it's these Demographics Shifts scare you. Maybe it's creating Shadow IT in your organization. Application Sprawl, and you can read the rest of these. These are real problems that CIOs and IT leaders, directors, are experiencing. This is not just what a research shows, this is what our customer interaction shows, as well. 

So, we are going to talk to these in the panel, a little bit, and how real customers solve these problems using Okta and Fuze, and hopefully, that's really helpful for you. So, I want to introduce to you Herminia Gomez again, and Andy Poier or Poirier, depending on how fancy do I want to be. They represent National Geographic and WeddingWire. Thank you again for being here guys. 

And, before we get started, Okta asked me to tell you, there's this survey card. And, hopefully, you are enjoying this panel, and please fill it up on your way out. It's located on most of the chairs that are next to you. The feedback is great. It can help us figure out how the session goes better next year, so please take the time to feel that up.

Alright, if you want to copy of these research, you want to share it with colleagues ... I'll just leave this slide up, this is where you can access it, a digital copy of it. For those of you who are not interested in the physical copy or you want to share it around. But, that's how you do it, and I'll leave this up here. 

So, perhaps Herminia you can get us started a little bit, and tell us a little bit about yourself, and your role in the National Geographic. 

Herminia Gomez: Okay. My name is Herminia Gomez, I worked in various roles and divisions for National Geographic since 1998. I am currently lead systems engineer, supporting Identity Access Management and Application Lifecycle Management. 

Alex: Excellent. Andy?

Andy Poirier: My name is Andy Poier or Poirier, I guess, depending where you are in the world. The senior IT engineer at WeddingWire. So, what I do is manage the internal IT for WeddingWire with the help of a small team. What WeddingWire is, it's a marketplace that connects engaged couples with vendors. So, if you are looking for a florist, or whatever, a caterer, you want to make sure that the food tastes good before you spend all this money on your wedding. So, that's where WeddingWire is important and why it's important. 

Alex: Excellent. And, to kind of tide that to what we are talking about today, can you talk to us a little bit about how your organization has embraced, kind of, flexibility and the remote work, that kind of remote workers that we are talking about. Herminia, do you want to get a start with that?

Herminia Gomez: Sure. National Geographic currently has 600+ employees. About 140 of those are identified as outside employees, with at least 15 or more that are tier one or tier two at support. We have no choice, but to support remote workers. 

Another thing that we have done is we promote flexible work. Full staff and contingent worker have the option to work from home. And, the IT department is one of the departments that, at least, one day we have a flexible work day. At least one day a week, and some have more if they need it or would like to have it. 

So, we have no choice but to support it because it's just the way of the business. 

Alex: Little bit of an ADMA question, but do you see people embracing that, taking advantage of that, and maybe more than one day?

Herminia Gomez: Oh yes, I do it all the time. We have a co-worker that ... She's a young mother, she has two young children. So, she works from home 3 days a week and comes in the office 2 days a week. And, sometimes, she'll switch it around. And, sometimes, you get sick. You are sick enough to work, but not to commute. IF you drive in DC you don't want to do it, so. 

Alex: We'll just say that you are being generous and not spreading your germs to everyone. You are just caring for your colleagues. Let's just spin it that way.

Herminia Gomez: Yeah, I like it.

Alex: Cover for you there. Andy, how about you?

Andy Poirier: Yes. So, we embrace remote and flexible work a 100 percent, out of necessity. So, we have 88 employees that are remote in 20 states, in United States. We also have a European headquarters in Spain, as well as, we are in 14 other countries.

So, at any time, for example, there could be someone at our India office that needs to work with someone in our LA office. That's a 12 hour time difference. So, the modern work schedule of nine-to-five doesn't really work when you need to work with somebody that's 12 hours ahead or behind you. So, we do it out of necessity. There's not really a choice any more. 

Alex: Yeah, and given that in this slide that I showed with the CIO, Andy can you talk a little bit about the challenges that that has brought into WeddingWire? And, whether it's for you, whether that's you are worried about the cost, whether that's you worried about these, kind of, "siloing" of data, or Shadow IT or some of these challenges.

What challenges have you seen?

Andy Poirier: There's not many challenges. But, if I had to think of one, it's probably cost. So, I'd love to have every service under the sun, that can automate my job completely because I don't want to do much work. But, there's a budget component to that, where I can't purchase every software. 

So, we, kind of, bridge the gap with open source programs sometimes, and custom scripts that we write. And, for example, for one of the open source programs ... So, we use monkey to deploy apps to the user's computers, instead of JAMF.

That saved us a little bit of money. And then, for custom scripts, really what we are doing is just finding if the service has any API that we can use to automate some of our workflows and then just adding it into our scripts.

Alex: Got it. Herminia how about you? Where are your challenges? 

Herminia Gomez: So, for us. First, we are SAS cloud, cloud up, first. SAS first. So, most of our applications are SAS based. We have small on-prem applications, but for us, it's not necessarily the budget or the communication. 

It's more finding the vendors that support full life cycle management!11 through their apps. I think that's the biggest issue on our end. And, transitioning, right? Because we did have a lot of, all of our applications were on on-prem. That's usually where the challenge is. 

Alex: Got it. And you've had a lot of interesting challenges with too, with National Geographic and Fox and with, kind of, all these-

Herminia Gomez: We are still going through those pains, so. 

Alex: ... well, anyway, that's probably a story for another day. If you were here last year during her session that was a 45 minute talk about that last year, which was pretty cool too. 

Alright, let's transition quickly, a little bit, to talk about, kind of, Fuze and Okta together. So, you mentioned that one of the magic words seems, kind of, lifecycle management, and things like that. But, I'm curious about how Fuze and Okta, in general fit, into your ecosystems. We can start there and then, kind of, build on that. So, you want to get started?

Herminia Gomez: Yeah. Fuze has made it much easier. So, one of the challenges that we have is that we have a new hire, that person is brought in. The managers are supposed to submit the request for hardware, software, name plates etc., they forget. Having Fuze provision the phone automatically saves us lots of time and lots of confusion. 

Those are requests that threw our help desk system that do not need to be submitted because the accounts are automatically fused, phone is automatically provisioned for the user. That makes it so much easier. But, one of the things that's also beneficial is ... I mentioned earlier that we have tier one and tier two support that are off-site. 

One of the problems that we have is when they call the user, they are calling from the number that's out of country, they are like, "Who are you? You are trying to get into my computer, this is not right", and they will call the help desk. So, that's like 30 minutes of a waste of time, trying to figure out if the person that's calling is legitimate. Well, now they can have a phone that's being provisioned by National Geographic. So, they see the phone number, they say, "Okay, I recognize this number. It's okay, I can accept the call". So, that's just-

Alex: Right, that, kind of, feeling of internal-

Herminia Gomez: ... exactly. 

Alex: Andy, how about you?

Andy Poirier: Just like Herminia said, we are cloud first. So, we use mostly cloud apps for everything, where it fits, besides the open source, aforementioned, and the custom scripts. But, it fits into our ecosystem well because, just like Drop Box, if I was creating a new marketing user, Drop Box would automatically provision this new user in creating account and then with the Push Groups, they would automatically be added to the team folders. 

And it works the same way with Fuze, but instead of access-to-files it automatically sorts them into the department, accounts provision, which helps with Fuze data because we have different managers and different departments that go over these data and see what their teams are doing. 

Alex: Okay. I guess it's the good time for some of the kind of, ways to use data that we were talking about earlier, and ways to, kind of, keep in touch with your, track your employees. Are these departments interacting appropriately, what is it like for disparate people? Maybe, let's say that your finance team is centralized within your HQ. Okay, well that's maybe not a big problem. You can go and find by your finance team, but what about your marketing team? Maybe they are distributed all over the place. How are they interacting? That's a good use of this. 

I think one key to that is adoption. I think you've heard in Todd's talking about a Keynote this morning. All the new tools that Okta is rolling out, I think the key to all of them, of course, is our employee's going to use this particular piece of technology. And, we spend a lot of time thinking about adoption, if you go to data-fuze.com, in your main dashboard we actually proactively show you how you’re doing with our applications. Are people using these? How is that usage? How is that trending over time? How many meetings are they going in? 

I think the only way for you to justify as IT leaders the investment that you are making in the SAS side is to have high adoption and I imagine that there is, kind of, SAS fatigue coming. I mean, just think about the number of applications that we could ... I haven't even prepped you for this, but we can probably talk about a guess of how many SAS applications everyone has in this room. It is a ton. Our marketing team, who has a couple people here, they have a lot of applications, right?

So, the question is, how many of those are actually useful and needed, and I think ... So, adoption is really, kind of, key. And so, what I am curious about is adoption of Okta, adoption of Fuze. The two, kind of, married together. What's the story like within your organizations, given that context?

Herminia Gomez: So, for National Geographic, we are old company. So, we tried everything and we know what works. We finally learned what works, and what doesn't. So, what we did is, we brought the user in from the beginning of the process. We asked the users, "What do you need? What are the tools? What do you need to do? What's important? What are your requirements?". That lead us to Fuze. Based on their requirements, we decided that Fuze was the best solution. 

They were the part of the decision process. We first rolled out Fuze to the IT department. We learned the product. We became comfortable with the product. We documented the pros and cons. And, most of the documentation of pros and cons is, "Okay, the users are going to ask this. This is the answer to that question", and we wrote knowledge articles with that information. So, the user was always part of the process, and the user is well informed. So, they adapted quickly and easily to the product. 

Alex: Alright, and Andy?

Andy Poirier: Yes, so ...

Alex: Kind of, how has the adoption been with Okta and Fuze?

Andy Poirier: It was, kind of, a rocky start for our Fuze implementation, but I'll start with my Okta ...

So, the way we implemented Okta was we decided to start with one app, Gmail. Our thinking was, if we could just change the login page, that would be the only change necessary. We would just change the authentication for the back end, and the adoption would just ... We would add on apps, and adoption would rise normally as people start to use those apps, and it works. That's the way we thought it would work, and it works.

So, we tried the same thing with Fuze, where I would just change the core service of our desk phone, so no one would be any wiser. Like, they're picking up a phone, it's the same phone number that they're dialing out with. No one knows that the service changed. 

But when we signed up with Fuze, you were actually called thinking phones-

Alex: Yes.

Andy Poirier: ... at the time?

Alex: That's right.

Andy Poirier: There was thinking phones apps, but when we purchased Fuze, the Fuze apps were a little bit down the road, like, a couple months. 

So, we initially didn't want to deploy the thinking phones apps, and just wait for the Fuze ones, but we kind of hyped it up with, "Now you can work from home, because we have all these apps." 

So, we kind of had to deploy the thinking phones apps first, and then a couple months later, deploy the Fuze apps, which still causes a little confusion to this day.

Alex: The good news is, none of you would have to experience that, because these are apps are end-of-life and gone, except for maybe, like, two users. But, no, I think that's a good story. I think one thing that I hear as a common theme between both of those is engaging your users early on.

Herminia Gomez: Yes.

Alex: It sounds a whole heck of a lot like product development to me, kind of like what I do on a daily basis, of talking to users and trying to anticipate these problems ahead of time. 

I think that's really good advice. I told Herminia before this that if she could just go ahead and tell all of our customers some of these best practices, and these knowledge-based articles. Or, you know, heck, could write a few for Fuze. We could probably be better off for this. Rolling out across National Geographic couldn't have been the easiest thing to do, so, that's great. 

I want to talk a little bit about ... In the research, we were talking about the app generation, and thinking about multiple generations engaging at work, kind of together. 

As you think about having multiple generations in the workforce, what role, if any, do you see IT playing in their engagement retention, and how does that work within National Geographic? 

Herminia Gomez: As I said, National Geographic is a very old company. I've been at the company for 20 years, and I remember laughing and making fun of some of my coworkers because they started working before I was born. So, the guy had been working for the company for 30-some years, the other one had been ... I know a lady that we celebrated her 50 year anniversary. 

But then we have new hires that are coming in of various age, right? Very young, that look like my children, and other ones that are my age, and some that are older. But what we've learned is that it's not about the age, it's not about the gender, it's not about anything else. It's about the tool. It's about getting the customer what they need to do their work.

So, always, as we say, engaging the customer. Asking, "What do you need to do your work?" We'll make sure that it's flexible, and we'll make sure that you have the flexibility to access it from home. You want to work from wherever it is that you want to work in, we want to make sure that it's secured. 

We always try to tell them, "Always go for SaaS." We want Cloud first, but it's all about asking the customer, "What tool do you need to get the job done?"

Alex: Alright, and Andy, I think, may be a little bit different, talking to you about your demographic in maybe a little bit younger workforce within WeddingWire. Less 50-year employees, probably. But why don't we talk through that a little bit?

Andy Poirier: Yeah, WeddingWire is a really young company. A lot of our hires are fresh out of college, and Herminia is completely right about, it's not about age, or it's not about sex or gender, or anything about if they're better computers or not. It's really about the person. It's, like, a person-to-person thing. 

I know sales people that are better at using their computers than developers, which is mind-boggling to me, but that exists at our company.

Herminia Gomez: Yeah. 

Alex: Yeah, and do you see any one of them present the most challenge to you, or are they kind of all very similar?

Andy Poirier: It's kind of all similar. 

Alex: Yeah. 

Andy Poirier: Yeah.

Herminia Gomez: I think, for us, it's educating the user. I think if you present a tool to the user that they don't understand, they pull away from it, but if you educate them in advance, they'll use the tool.

Alex: Yeah. It's interesting. 

How locked down are you ... Again, kind of an ad hoc question here, but how locked down are you from, like, a Shadow IT perspective? Like, is that a problem that either of you face? If, you know, "Hey, Andy or Herminia, I really want to use this thing." 

Or, I think, maybe, the more likely scenario is, all of a sudden, you're, like, listening in the kitchen, and you're like, "Oh, did you guys check," ... You know, "Have you guys logged into fill-in-the-blank recently?" Is that something that you guys encounter?

Herminia Gomez: Well, in the past, yes.

Alex: Yeah, okay.

Herminia Gomez: We had multiple Shadow IT departments, to the point that they ... It was ridiculous. 

I think that after the joint venture with Fox, and all the reorganization, I think IT sort of took a look at itself, and was like, "Okay, we got to change the way we do things." Because, again, it's ... The reason for those Shadow IT was because we were telling them what tools they needed to do their work. 

So, we're like, "Okay, you're not giving me what I want to do my job. I'm going to go find it myself, and I'm going to implement it, because I need to do my job."

Alex: Right.

Herminia Gomez: But because they're telling us, and we're just securing it, then we reduce - not completely get rid of, but reduce - that Shadow IT-

Alex: Yeah, yeah.

Herminia Gomez: ... department. 

Alex: I don't think you can get rid of it these days-

Herminia Gomez: No.

Alex: ... but reduction is probably good. Very common booth topic, I could tell you, over the last two days as well. 

Andy, anything to add there?

Andy Poirier: Yeah, so, when we started with Okta, we had lots of Shadow IT, as you can imagine. Lots of different departments got the services that they needed, and then managed it themselves.

When we got Okta, it was our chance to kind of integrate all these things into one platform. With Okta, actually, we can assign those people admin rights. So, they are still managing their applications, but we do have control over the application-

Alex: Exactly.

Andy Poirier: ... and what's happening with it.

Alex: That's kind of nice.

Andy Poirier: Yeah.

Alex: A topic kind of related, I guess, is what Okta would call, kind of, "the extended enterprise." It's the use of ... As you saw in one of the trends, working as a service trend, it's the use of these teams. That kind of spin up of contractors, and maybe partners, and temporary workers, to help solve a particular problem.

I'm very curious about this, because I see, within our own customer base - which is primarily customers 1000 users and above, globally - that is probably one of the most requested things into our product art these days, which is we're trying to be more flexible with who does work. Like, how can you help us with that?

I'm curious to see, within your organizations, how have you embraced or rejected, or deal with, this notion of a guest, and these notions of the extended enterprise? 

Andy, do you want to start this one?

Andy Poirier: Sure. 

So, we do have a lot of contractors. From BPO firms, SEO consulting firms, Instagram influencers. We have tons of contractors. We all manage it all through Okta with groups. 

So, we change. We have different policies for authentication for different groups, different multi-factor authentication policies for those different types of groups. 

In Slack, too, we even have, like, guest channels, or single channel guests, where they don't cost anything, but-

Alex: That's right.

Andy Poirier: ... we have guests in there. 

Herminia Gomez: Yeah. National Geographic is in the same boat. We have contractors, we have partners, okay? Which presents a major issue.

So, we're doing exactly the same thing. Everyone has to come through Okta. We have security groups and polices. We use multi-factor a lot. We have on-prem and off-prem policies that we implement and we enforce.

So, yeah. It's pretty much the same thing that we're doing.

Alex: Yeah, that's interesting. I think that's definitely a trend, something to keep an eye on. I think, for us, our product's evolving to have more functionality for guests. I mean, it requires a lot more control, as you were just saying.

Guests can join the organization, but then they can only join meetings. Or they can start their own meeting, or they can be participating in a group chat, or maybe you don't want them to do that, because some partners are more trusted than others. 

And what happens when the partner leaves and then comes back again, right? All the same problems that you got-

Herminia Gomez: Oh, yeah.

Alex: ... you know, you experience. It's nice to have ... Okta is that kind of common layer there. 

Alright, so, maybe just a bit of a softball here at the end for you. Let's talk, just in general, about things that you're doing to embrace this future of work, and any of these trends inside of your organizations. Like, what is the rest of 2018, 2019? Some exciting things that you're doing? 

That, of course ... You know, non-NDA items here that we could talk about. 

Herminia Gomez: Oh, we're doing a lot. It feels like we're doing too much, but we just wrapped up what we call, "The user portal," with ServiceNow, where we're trying to make it easier for the users, or our customers, to get to the things that they need. A ticket, a request, issues. We improve the design of our portal, make it more user-friendly.

In addition to that ... If you saw me last year, my whole motto is, "Okta as master." So, trying to use Okta as the directory, which includes integrating with on-prem and off-prem appliances.

We're also going through the process of onboarding 360, with Okta and Workday, ServiceNow. So, what that will do is it will automate a lot of the things that our managers, when they're hiring someone in, that they have to do.

So, again, one of the issues is they forget to order things. They forget to do certain things, and there are things that they shouldn't even have to remember, that we could automatically do it for them. They should be focusing on doing their jobs and making National Geographic a great company.

If we can automate it for them, let's do it. So, that's what we're focused on.

Alex: That's great. Andy?

Andy Poirier: Yeah, actually, if I could steal Herminia's answer....

I wish we could be implementing ServiceNow and Workday. But, really, what we're going to be focusing on for the next year or so is automating, in our own way, the custom with the scripts that we've created ourselves.

Alex: Mm-hmm (affirmative)-

Andy Poirier: It's been working enough for the size that we are right now. I'm sure we're going to have to explore new options if we get bigger. But for right now, it's kind of do-it-ourselves.

Alex: Got it. Awesome.

Alright, so, we wanted to leave a minute or two for questions. Before I dismiss you to go to your last panel, or do your preparation stretches before Brock, here in a little bit. 

But are there any questions from anybody? Can talk about Fuze, this research, and just happy to entertain anything you might have.

Speaker 1: I don't have a mic here. You have questions? 

Alex: No. 

Speaker 1: No questions? 

Alex: Awesome. 

Well, look, I really appreciate everyone taking the time to join us today. Again, this is where the research is available. There's plenty of other things that are on that site as well, from the previous version of this data.

Enjoy the rest of the show. Thank you both, Herminia and Andy, for joining me today. I really, really appreciate the time. 

But, again, thanks everyone. Have a good rest of your Oktane.