HP Engages Customers via Unified Identity Ecosystem

The Objective

HP Inc.’s vision is to create technology that makes life better for everyone, everywhere. Their customers and partners all over the world require solutions that are available globally—and delivered securely.

The organization wanted to uplevel the customer experience by providing customers with a 360-degree view of their HP experience while optimizing spend. They also required an identity store that could hold hundreds of millions of records—and scale to support over a billion identities once all IoT devices have entered the ecosystem.

The CTO and IT organizations set out to create the new HP Identity (HP ID) program—a unified identity management ecosystem across the enterprise—while retiring their existing solutions.

The Challenge

HP had a fragmented user base with more than a dozen separate legacy identity management and authentication systems. Siloed data created a disjointed customer experience, and systems integration complexity increased management burdens and costs.

Also, regional requirements in different countries restrict how data is stored or how it can move in and out of systems around the world. As a global player, HP operates within many different legal zones. As a result, authentication happening in the background needed to be intelligent.

Lastly, this was HP’s largest identity initiative to date. Over 100 applications, including HP Shopping, HP Partner First Portal, ePrint, and more needed to be migrated to the new platform. Because of the large number of concurrent work streams and dependencies, any delay or misstep would propagate through the whole chain. The team set a goal of 99.95% uptime, with zero planned downtime allowed.

The Solution

Using OAuth 2.0 and SCIM, the project team created a common user interface flow for identity registration and login, enabling single sign-on (SSO) for these identities across the entire universe of HP experiences. With the new centralized service, customers can now use Facebook or Google social login to authenticate.

The HP and Ping professional services teams worked in close partnership to implement PingDirectory and PingDataGovernance with fully automated, multi-region deployment in Amazon Web Services (AWS).

HP created an integration layer using Apigee for simple client registration and improved security in the cloud environment. In order for HP ID to be deployed and hosted globally in the cloud, the HP team created automated scripts and tooling that supported repeatable deployments, thus preventing engineers from having to manually administer new stacks.

The platform allows applications the flexibility to easily access user data when they need it and offers the necessary infrastructure to provide segregation of data by country or regional requirements.

The Results

Every 60 seconds, HP delivers 102 PCs, 63 printers, and 983 consumables to customers all over the world. Today, more than 100 HP business applications are now using HP ID to engage customers and partners globally from the cloud in a secure, highly available environment.

HP ID provides single sign-on for over 150 million existing identities, adding thousands of new identities per day. HP ID solved a disjointed user experience, reducing confusion and frustration among customers. The radically simplified experience enables customers and partners to easily recognize and use a single identity across all of their HP applications.

Before HP’s Ping Identity deployment, more than a dozen legacy systems were in use across the enterprise. Today, HP has a single IAM platform deployed across the entire organization—reducing complexity, optimizing spending, and enabling new business as the company evolves.