ForgeRock Congratulates BMW on Prestigious KuppingerCole Award

by Nicole Roseveare on July 17, 2020

I have such a great job. I’m constantly inspired by ForgeRock customers all over the world who are delivering breakthrough digital experiences. So I know that these individuals are innovating beyond expectations, but it’s always gratifying when the industry also gives credit where credit is due. KuppingerCole, Europe’s leading analyst firm for Information Security, awarded BMW its prestigious KC Virtual Award.

The KC Virtual Awards honor outstanding Identity Management (IM) and Security projects and this year the award for the best IAM for Digital Transformation project was bestowed upon BMW. The globally recognized automaker has a strong focus on identity. The company manages 25 million identities ranging from employees to customers to dealers, ensuring the right people are using the right products and apps, and enjoying the best possible digital experience.

How Did BMW Do It?

It was important to BMW to ensure ease-of-use so its customers and partners can easily and safely access various BMW applications. To achieve this, BMW needed to consolidate its numerous disparate systems and build a central Identity Platform (IDP) for the whole organization to better serve its employees, customers, partners, car dealers and technical providers. Prior to the consolidation, BMW was developing tons of custom code to connect various systems, which was costly and time-consuming. The disparate systems also required users to log in to multiple systems multiple times, which complicated the goal of a seamless user experience.

BMW embarked on an identity strategy, called OneIDP, which required the company to consolidate 20 different Identity Management and Access Management (IAM) systems that supported its three brands (BMW, Mini and Rolls Royce and other entities like BMW Financial Services) into one. With this project, BMW wanted to:

Offer an exceptional and seamless user experience
Reduce onboarding and maintenance cost through automation
Achieve faster time to market through automation
Increase scalability
Enable new business cases such as IoT
Increase performance

ForgeRock’s platform enabled the company to bring together its identity systems and achieve significant cost savings, improve time to market, scalability and compliance. The new approach, which supports 25 million users, also allows BMW to deliver critical data and services to consumers, partners quickly, easily and securely. Stephanus Reiger, Group IT–Infrastructure and Technology Management for BMW Group, recently participated in a virtual panel during ForgeRock Identity Live and said, “ForgeRock is essential for us to create a central IDP for BMW.”

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BMW for the Win!

Since deploying OneIDP, BMW has surpassed expectations. For example, rolling out new applications was costly and took up to 15 days. With ForgeRock, the process is automated, making it possible to deploy new apps within seconds and at zero cost. Additionally, internal performance tests revealed that BMW can process 8,000 authentication requests per second. During the award ceremony, Gerald Maier, IT Solutions Architect for BMW, said, “I’d really like to thank the 2 partners, IC Consult…and of course ForgeRock because in my opinion they not only have excellent software, they really supported us with excellent knowledge and experience.”

Click here to read more about the BMW story. Want to learn more about how to replicate BMW’s transformative identity solution? Find out how you coexist, migrate, or retire your IAM system here.