Identity Wins Amidst M&A
“We made a decision that we wanted to get off of the Oracle Suite of products and we took on the challenge of the merger and acquisition activities at the same time. I’m proud to say at this point we are off of the Oracle platforms and we successfully delivered on the merger activities as well.”
— Mohan Ramaswamy, Senior Manager, Digital Services Group at T-Mobile
科技業
T-Mobile is a global wireless telecommunications service provider who completed a merger with Sprint.
The challenge
T-Mobile had an ambitious goal – migrate from their legacy identity system while navigating a merger and acquisition. To accomplish this task, they needed an identity solution that would not only allow them to provision access on day one, but would be flexible enough to handle their changing business needs.
The solution
- Created a flexible identity program
- Automated the provisioning of user’s access
- Navigated a M&A that resulted in a seamless day one experience for end users
The results
By upgrading from a legacy identity system to SailPoint, T-Mobile now has an identity program that can adapt to changing business needs. They have automated and centralized the provisioning of user’s access which allowed them to successfully navigate a merger and acquisition.
A Conversation with T-Mobile and SailPoint
Nicole Thomas: Hello and welcome to our viewers I’m Nicole Thomas. And today we’re going to hear from SailPoint customer Mohan Ramaswamy. He’s the Senior Manager in the digital services group at T-Mobile. T-Mobile is a wireless telecommunication service provider. Mohan, thank you so much for joining me today.
Mohan Ramaswamy: Thank you for having me.
Nicole Thomas: Could you tell me a bit about your background and what you do at T-Mobile?
Mohan Ramaswamy: Yes, absolutely. I’m currently the Senior Manager at T-Mobile, for the Identity and Access Management Team. As part of that domain my team performs authentication, authorization, provisioning as well as fine grained entitlements for our applications. In the past, we were predominantly an Oracle shop. So we had the Oracle IBM Suite. And that involves the Oracle Access Manager the entitlement plus server, identity manager virtual directory as well as the internet directory. And over the past 18 months, we have been, migrating out of those products and into Okta, SailPoint and even created our own custom fine-grained entitlement policy manager application to really be on the cloud infrastructure that provides a great amount of reliability and scalability for us.
Nicole Thomas: How has identity been foundational during your acquisition and merger activities?
Mohan Ramaswamy : T-Mobile is currently still very assisted channel-based company. So while we are trying to improve the customers to do you know, perform self-service transactions, predominantly our customers go to the stores and our call centers for any type of transaction that wants, they want to do. So naturally with the merger acquisition activities, our business wanted to enable the retail stores and our call centers to be, available for the customers on day one. So, identity to make that happen is a very very critical piece. And both T-Mobile and Sprint have very very complex set of systems for their users that involves not only authentication but also commission systems. So integrating these two systems these two companies was definitely, you know a priority and a difficult task. We worked through several parlor sessions with the Sprint counterpart and we came up with a design that would work for both companies in exchanging the user identities from Sprint to T-Mobile and T-Mobile to Sprint, and provisioning within each other’s systems. All of those, all of that was, you know, went well but because of the legal hurdles we still could not integrate and test against each other systems. So, the teams came up with innovative ways to test the solutions that we had put in place including creating our own environments, you know just guess working the environments, testing as much as possible. And, we had a very very successful day, one because of those activities.
Nicole Thomas: What has been the biggest win from your team’s identity efforts?
Mohan Ramaswamy : Well, more than, two years back our systems were predominantly the Oracle IBM Suite. So that involves the Oracle Identity Manager, Oracle Access Manager, the internet directory, the virtual directory as well as the Oracle Entitlement Server. We made a roadmap decision more than two years back that we want to get off of the Oracle Suite of products, right? And as we were in the midst of this we had this big merger and acquisition and definitely not it’s not something that we do every day. So the, the teams, you know, we, we do not let the foot off the gas pedal there. We proceeded on to, proceeded on with our roadmap activities and took on the challenge of the merger acquisition activities as well. And I’m proud to say at this point we are off of the Oracle platforms and we successfully delivered on the, the merger activities as well.
Nicole Thomas: Well, Mohan it’s been a pleasure talking with you and learning more about your guy’s identity journey. We’re excited to see what you guys accomplish next. Thanks so much.
Mohan Ramaswamy: Thank you.
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