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Unifying credentials for a seamless customer experience of media and entertainment brands
Media & Entertainment
How Equal Experts converged over 850 million identities for one of the world’s leading entertainment companies.
Equal Experts launched a new identity platform for one of the world’s leading entertainment companies, which enabled the launch of a new streaming service. Equal Experts then led a credentials unification project, which converged identities from over 250 other entertainment businesses within the company and enabled single logins and seamless customer experiences across its vast range of leisure, shopping, media and other properties.
Outcomes
850 million
identities converged
250 business units
with seamless customer experiences enabled
Convergence achieved
with no service downtime, and no interruption to customer experiences
About the client
Equal Experts’ client is one of the world’s leading entertainment businesses, and a Fortune 500 company with over 200,000 employees worldwide. It operates more than 250 different global entertainment properties and has an annual turnover of more than $90 billion.
Industry
Media & Entertainment
Organisation size
200k+ employees
Location
UK
Challenge
Converging 850 million identities across 250 global entertainment businesses
Having worked with Equal Experts to create an identity platform for the launch of a new streaming service, the client needed to converge identities between this new platform and a legacy identity architecture serving more than 250 other media and entertainment brands.
The client’s strategy of keeping identities aligned through a caching layer struggled to deal with the more than 850 million identities involved and the complexities of co-ordinating them in real-time across a wide range of different customer experiences. This resulted in customers in most countries requiring different sets of credentials for accessing different experiences, and an increased risk of identities becoming lost and users being locked out of accounts when updates were made. In addition, the duplication of resources led to growing costs, and the complex architecture increased the risks of launching new services.
The challenge was further complicated by the requirement to converge the identities without any interruption to customer experiences, because of the elevated reputational risk associated with well-known global brands. The importance of key revenue-driving events during the year also constrained the time available for the credentials unification project.
Solution
Derisking convergence and creating a single source of truth through a graph service
Equal Experts developed a two-phase strategy for unifying credentials across the new identity platform and the legacy architecture, using a graph service to reduce dependence on the caching layer, and enable real-time alignment of credentials. Once this alignment was achieved, the new identity platform became the single source of truth for credentials, with the legacy architecture acting purely as a front-end service, helping to preserve feature parity.
Having mapped all identities through the graph service, Equal Experts was able to migrate remaining credentials, including passwords and important compliance information, from the legacy identity architecture to the new platform. This eliminated any remaining duplication and established the new identity platform as the home for all credentials. Users of the company’s wide range of stores, visitor destinations and media channels could log into their profiles as before, with no loss of features and a single set of credentials now working across all of their different experiences.
Results
Over 850 million identities converged with zero interruption to customer experience
Equal Experts successfully converged over 850 million identities with zero service downtime and no interruption to customer experiences. The success of this project has simplified and derisked the client’s previously complex legacy identity architecture. In doing so, it has reduced costs and enabled a more innovative approach to developing new services and customer experiences.
Unifying credentials and simplifying identity architecture delivered immediate benefits in terms of reduced costs and improved customer experiences. At the same time it significantly reduced the risks resulting from a complex and costly architecture, safeguarded and simplified identity management, and enabled future innovation.
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How Equal Experts converged over 850 million identities for one of the world’s leading entertainment companies.