Objective

Walking into a Best Buy is a consumer electronics dream. Upon entering, you see the familiar and welcoming Best Buy “blue shirts” and know your electronic goals will be met. In the store, you will also see other shirts with logos of Best Buy partners like Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, and more, who collaborate with the company to help customers meet their varying technological needs. It’s truly a pretty awesome one-stop-shop experience, but did you ever stop to think about the complexity of the systems that allow these groups to work together in a shared space? For example, a Microsoft employee will probably not want to use an iPad, and an Apple employee should not be able to see Microsoft customer information and sales data. There are countless complexities with all of these vendors operating together in the same store. And all of these complexities are occurring in more than 1,100 locations globally.

Best Buy then embarked on a very comprehensive RFP that included 450 unique use cases. After proving it could meet Best Buy’s various needs, Best Buy decided to consolidate all of its IAM for every user base except for customers onto Ping. Best Buy chose Ping because of its ability to provide a flexible and customizable solution, while also offering a migration path to the cloud. For example, In the store, a Samsung employee can access systems to see customers’ phones and plans and they often need different personas in order to access different systems. Best Buy manages these personas and their access to data and apps. While these apps are similar, they can’t see each other’s data, so they needed to create different personas to access different apps. One person even had 42 identities.