In 2010, the leaders of a large printing and imaging company sought to expand their business portfolio outside of the enterprise printer market. On top of the services they were currently offering, they also wanted to offer enterprise software services to supplement their printer business. With this goal in mind, they made the decision to acquire a large software development company. This development firm specialized in organizing and managing digital business documents to help businesses organize their e-documents and quickly find them as needed. Thus, the printing company purchased this software development company in a strategic move to own both the physical process and digital process.
After the acquisition, the Chief marketing Officer (CMO) wanted to unify the two companies by integrating each organization under one cohesive brand vision. To accomplish this, the IT team was to implement identity management solutions across their customer portals, partner portals, and community portals. This would help customers and partners “feel” this brand unification and convey a more united organization. Leveraging identity management during a large merger makes a positive difference toward unifying systems across business units, and the leaders knew this, however, it wasn’t long before issues began to arise. Two parties shared responsible for identity management: the company’s internal IT department and their marketing web team. Unfortunately, the internal IT team would often miss the deadline for important project deadlines due to other competing internal priorities. The leaders were frustrated, needless to say. On top of overseeing a major company merger, the technology operations were simply inadequate. Inopportunely, the technical operators/TechOps were unable to keep pace with management’s needs for the merger and its timeline. Their inability to keep pace with technical changes also meant wasted effort in other stages of the merger process. The company needed a knowledgeable identity management company – and fast.
Feeling discouraged, the Senior Manager of Web Technologies asked a web marketing team member if they knew any tech experts that could help. They recommended Digital Maelstrom, as our IT advisor firm members have extensive capabilities and experience in identity management/access management solutions. After talking through the current issues and goals of the project, the printing company and Digital Maelstrom chose to partner together. This would help augment the oversubscribed internal teams with the technical vision required by the merger’s challenges and the experience to see it implemented successfully.
Identity Management Solutions For Any Type of Business
During our partnership, Digital Maelstrom integrated each of the two merging companies’ user data and processes across numerous systems with PingFederate into Adobe Experience Manager (AEM). Later, they would once again integrate the systems and processes from PingFederate to SiteMinder as larger corporate strategies changed. Further, we would then comprehensively integrate many of their portals so that users only had to log in once via a single sign-on experience (SSO). After the success of these projects, the company was immensely pleased with the end result. In fact, our IT operations team continued assisting with integrations and management for many more years and additional projects.
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