Katherine Bayless: Thanks, Sam. How’s it going? Samuel Roberts: Pretty good. How about yourself? Katherine Bayless: Pretty good. , I’m curious for a Monday. Samuel Roberts: , it’s a big Monday for me, I’m playing catch-up from the last… Katherine Bayless: Oh my gosh. Samuel Roberts: Giving through now, , . Katherine Bayless: Welcome back, welcome back. Samuel Roberts: Thank you, thank you, . Katherine Bayless: I’ll wait, there’s the John. I was gonna say, I’ll wait to say that, Jay, , is gonna be maybe, , 20 or minutes behind me. He had to take his brand new puppy to the vet. Not for a bad thing, just for a, , , first visit, . Samuel Roberts: , of course. All that stuff. I realize that could be a really scary sentence. , I assumed it was if it’s a new puppy, but . Katherine Bayless: , , . But , he’s taking him in for his, , first checkup, and the appointment was at 11, he said he’d join as soon as he got back to his desk, but I figured there’s probably stuff we can use the time to talk about anyway, need to reschedule. Cool. , hello, good morning. Uttam Kumaran: Good morning, I gave Sam a little bit of the overview, but I wasn’t… I also didn’t have, , tons of details, , maybe, , we could use a little bit of the beginning just to prep for that. The only, probably, thing on the data side to call out is Ashwini had some questions about the remembers data. Just, , matching up some of the relationships that you mentioned. In the report. what we’re trying to do is, , leverage that report as, , a first test for end-to-end BDT. … That’s what we’ve, he just sent a note there about that, … Katherine Bayless: , , , let me… I’ll… send him a note. Truthfully, … I’m , honestly, maybe I’ll take a first pass at helping him get set on the direction. Uttam Kumaran: , I also said you could just… you could just plug us with their numbers, too. Or we could go directly to the report. Katherine Bayless: , mainly it’s , we’re just trying to… Uttam Kumaran: Find out if we’re using the join keys and places that. Katherine Bayless: , that’s why I’m , I might be able to answer, depending on what he’s stuck on, I might know more about the join keys than the folks in-house, and the remembers folks are difficult. , . , I’ve done a few, implementations of remembers for, , the YWCA and for the, Textile Rental Services Association, because there’s one of us for everything. And I, , I’m pretty familiar with the data model on the back end, and it is… it is an odd one. , it’s a little convoluted, but… , I’ll follow up with Ashmini. Oh, and then you had a question about Fridays at 10.30? Totally great for me. . , , . . , Fridays are usually a pretty good day to catch me for the most part, because, , everything else tends to be quiet. Sometimes. Sometimes. But , 10.30 this Friday is perfect. Uttam Kumaran: , cool. And then, , , , do we want to just jump into the Okta stuff? You wanna… do you want to set the stage for that, and then maybe we can… start to talk about it, and that way Jay doesn’t have to do that, he can just hop in. Katherine Bayless: , I can… I can at least give a little bit of the basics. Definitely Jay’s gonna have the deeper, more technical, bits, but, At a high level. , truthfully, , it sounds silly, but, , the chief complaint bringing us to the table today is that I’ve never had to enter my password as much as I do here. , enter, enter my password. And other people are complaining about the same thing. , I have to enter it twice, or, , I’m entering it after I’ve put in the two-factor thing already, ? And it’s … It’s just this, , a lot of friction around logging in. there’s a lot of friction in our systems in general, and when there’s something that’s friction-full around such a basic piece, , the pitchforks, they come after Jay very quickly, and I know he’s been trying to disentangle a lot of the stuff in Okta, but, , I’m , let’s just… let’s bring in some help, ? , , , instead of waiting for you to get 5 minutes here and there to keep troubleshooting. , let’s see if we can get, , a holistic look at this. As far as I understand, the challenges come from , , two main things. One is that we are using Okta to authenticate, username and password authenticate, everyone who comes in contact with our systems, which means all 150,000 people registering for CES, have to have a username and password in Okta in order to get in to register. , , that’s the eyes for that. , ? And , , we have two tenants now, one that is for, , internal staff and, , known entities that do need to interact regularly, and then one that is for this larger audience. But they’re still both using username and password. In my experience, implementing authentication this, you would use, , a magic link setup for everybody who’s not dealing with you on a day-to-day basis, just because handlier. Interestingly, our Google Analytics show a little bit of the trouble this is causing for people trying to register for CES, because we see the Okta dashboard as one of our, , top referrers to registration, but they’re only landing there because they got stuck in some forgot password hell, ? there’s that piece, is… long-term, we need to figure out how do we stop username and passwording all these people, probably, but I’m not where and how that gets disentangled. Then the other challenge is the rules that are, , determining access and level of access. some of them are… just … need to be a little tender, love, and cared, ? , an order of operations problem, but Jay is also … some of his understanding of the challenge is that, , the rules need to remain, but they’re causing problems. , it’s a CTA preference and policy that makes sense when somebody talks, but once you put it into code, it’s, , a pain in the ass, frankly. And , it might be the case that we can’t fix some of those things, but that’s where my brain goes to, , , but a third party has told us our policy is causing problems. Would we to change it now? ? And , , I’m thinking the goal is , if there is stuff we can fix-fix, awesome. If there’s stuff that’s , , it works the way you want it to, I’m just not you should want it to work that way, then that becomes a brief we can give to leadership to say, , come on, guys. , that’s the high level, if that makes sense. Uttam Kumaran: , I feel my thought, Sam, overall, is, , we just… I would love to hear from Jay on, . , , what was the assessment on Okta? And then maybe it is, , we put together, , a little memo, and , , what can be done here? , whether if it is investigating MagicLink, or can do stuff within Okta, maybe you just… our team can take , we can just, , put something together, a write-up on, , what’s possible. That way, , centralizes, , everything around the problem. it… and then… Kinda go from there. , we do a lot with auth, and even Sam, , Surf on our side has done a lot with off, too, we can loop people in. Samuel Roberts: Anyway, , perfect. Uttam Kumaran: , we can loop people in as we figure it out, … that’s… is that, , a… probably a good, , if we were to time box… I know stuff is urgent, if we were to time box… something, , that’s probably what I would say, Catherine, , this week we just drive towards, , let’s just do some discovery and then put something together for things to try. Katherine Bayless: I should also say, part of what seems, at least to me, maybe Jay would be , , those are unrelated, and you just are noticing them together, but, , what seemed to kick off the cascade of increased frustration was we did finally, , complete our migration from Active Directory to Entra, and it feels that improved some things, but then also, , surfaced more of the squiggly bits, it seems. I said, he might be , those are unrelated. I know they’re both auth-related. And then this also downstream trails into, , the Shopify challenge that we have, which is… Jay’s pretty convinced it’s user error. I’m , , at a certain point, the data suggests something different. If our users do manage to brute force their way through everything else, but Shopify seems to be the one that is, , just killing people. We have this setup where they can purchase, , reports and research that we sell via Shopify. and they get delivered via our AMS. There’s some loop between Okta and Remembers and Shopify that, , it gets… funky somewhere in there. And , , what’ll happen is people will, , log in, try to download, try to buy something, and then the download won’t work, or vice versa. And now we have this, , Slack channel set up where people can send in, , report download issues, and Jay built, , a Gleam agent, , a workflow to troubleshoot. all that’s really happening is people are just longer using the Slack channel or the Glean agent, and instead just cursing his name under their breast when he’s not present, ? , , I… but I’m , there’s some of these, , death by a thousand cuts things that I’m , we could just fix them. And , I’m cautiously optimistic that disentangling Okta might solve Shopify, but there’s also a possibility Shopify’s got its own issue. Uttam Kumaran: , on that side, Catherine, , what’s… if… it’s probably the Okta, and if the Okta thing is a priority for this week. I did speak… Also to serve Sam about this Shopify thing, but that’s honestly closer to a lot of the work that we’ve done. , Sam, it’s a dig… it’s a digital asset that they’re… that the team is selling through Shopify. Samuel Roberts: . And then… Uttam Kumaran: there is a, , login process. That’s what the related link is. Maybe, Catherine, do you think it’s… Should we ask Jay about the Shopify setup as ? , then we can just talk about both those things. one… the Okta thing is… probably higher priority, but I would say, for each of these, , we would just try to drive towards, . some type of discovery document. . That way, you can… , for example, if it’s, … that way, you could use that to also, , send that to people, be , is this ? , does this cover the set of problems? And then we can scope that out, . that’s just, , what… what I would need to also to just, , see… see everything, and then we can also… we can also be , , we’re just gonna go discover everything that’s happening. On the Shopify side, I have… I’m… I’m, . Not as concerned, we just do a lot of Shopify stuff. But , the Okta thing is, , touches both, … Katherine Bayless: , and part of the trick, and I very much agree with what you said about prioritizing Okta, and in part also because Shopify is a little bit… ambiguously owned, , , it sounds it was set up by the previous, , VP of marketing, because they were tired of dealing with the authentication challenges with remembers, which is where we used to sell and deliver all these products through. they brought Shopify in, now marketing is still the, , system owner for Shopify. But they don’t really know what to do with it, and, , nobody over there is really involved. the stuff that’s being sold in Shopify is produced by the market research team, but they don’t own Shopify, and then the authentication wrapper is Okta, that’s Jay. that’s why I’m , , , we’ll definitely get further on Okta than we will probably on Shopify faster, but . . Samuel Roberts: That makes sense. Uttam Kumaran: , and also, Catherine, this would help you be , if you’re gonna take this scope on, then, , at least you have us to do the muscle. Because, , without that, without the muscle, then I wouldn’t take it. I wouldn’t sign up for… ? This is the Shopify piece, because, , the way you’re describing it, , it’s just in the ether, and I truly know how you’re feeling. You’re , I could probably fix this. But then I will, , mentally explode, … I hope, Sam, , the context is just, , if we can give Catherine a little bit of our understanding on, , our list and our confidence. And it gives her some ability to say, , , is this something that we can take on? Or is this something worth taking on now? Katherine Bayless: , a potential long-term use case for Shopify that, , would benefit my world is this, , we have all of this data sharing stuff that we need to do that’s, , contractual, , delivering the lead gen badge scans that after the show, and now it’s a SharePoint site. I would it to be anything else, but, , part of me is , , Shopify might make sense, , if you could put the products in there in, , a hidden way, but then, , give it to, , , , XYZ company, this is your URL, this is who we’ve, , set up, then… go in and buy it, buy the product? . I’m not , but it seems a logical way to maybe handle that. , lots of opportunities. Uttam Kumaran: The other thing I owe is a meeting with Polytomic. Katherine Bayless: Hmm, just a sec. Uttam Kumaran: Come on here. Katherine Bayless: , I was floating earlier today, the whole Cvent thing, and, . still trying to figure out, , where the edges are, , does anybody really Cvent, or can we just … because I’m… Polytomic, you said, has an EventPoint connector, or was interested in building one. I can’t remember. Uttam Kumaran: , and , they’re… , , the difference between them and Fivetran is, , they’ll just start… they’ll build it for us. As long as, , they… they do have endpoints that aren’t just, , fake endpoints. that’s the advantage with… with working for them, working with them. for most people. , who we put both of them against, they tend to go to Polytomic. Some clients are using Fivetran for, . Super mission-critical stuff. Hey, Jake. Nice to see you. Jay Heavner: Nice to see you. Uttam Kumaran: , , Catherine, I can… , I can let you take it over. Katherine Bayless: , I’ll talk for 3 seconds, and then I’ll step down. I was gonna say, we all met briefly on the call where Jay was helping set up some of the access stuff, but , I just… I’ve given them a little bit of the briefer on, , Okta has challenges, because we’re authenticating everyone in our world with username and password, and also probably some of our policies are Doing what we want them to, but we probably shouldn’t want them to do that. And … and then the potential downstream Shopify piece, but I will now let Jay explain all the things more correctly than I ever could. Jay Heavner: , we have two Okta instances. We have a workforce instance for staff, we have a customer Denny instance for customers. the customer instance is pretty simple. We need, SSO. We don’t care that much about we’re not protecting anything super valuable there, but we wanted SSO because we have many partners in the… CES, Member Universe, and just allowing them to. authenticate effectively. Plus, before Okta, people were just… rolling their own authentication. , all of our vendors had their own, , authentication methods, now… They have that. We’d them to use the access tokens and the benefit of OIDC, but A lot of our partners are not… incredibly mature, that’s… that’s tough for them. that’s that part, and it really is, , it’s basic authentication, it’s username and password. We’re not enforcing anything there, we’re not requiring two-factor MFA, any of that, it’s just to get them in. On the workforce side, that is only for staff. Contractors, official folks that we allot into our tenant. the challenges there, we have a couple challenges there. One, last year at the audit committee, my board told me, hey, we were talking about BYOD, and I’m , I can’t get BYOD across the finish line. Just, I don’t have the hard power to enforce it, and… They’re , let’s get it done. we started it, that project got shut down at a certain point by the president, because one of the SVPs said, you will not put a profile on my personal phone. And I’m not going to use your corporate device. And they’re , alright, , we just won’t do this. And that is a lot of the problem with the policies we have set up, is we have best practice policies, but then we are forced to carve out exceptions for certain people or certain groups. Or, , we want to use Okta uses something called FastPass, which is their main passwordless-less… passwordless? methodology. It’s pushed to everyone’s computer at this point through Intune, but not everyone has enrolled in it, we’ve got inconsistent enrollment there. We’re also using something called Collide for… Okta doesn’t do great device assurance. They’ve got some baked in, but it’s really rudimentary, we’re using something called Collide. that, does a much better job of device assurance. But again, folks have to enroll a device in that thing, … it can be used as a factor, ? if you logged in and you don’t have the updates, or you don’t have an encrypted hard drive or whatever. It can mourn you and help you remediate it and get back to fixed state, but we’ve also had some inconsistency with getting that fully rolled out to people, because for a variety of reasons, it’s… it takes a little bit of effort for the end user to do this. and people will get a new device or something, and they… they don’t want to do it, or they forget to do it, or… it just… it’s too much friction for them to do it. We did have, , occasionally cloud services go down, at one point, Collide stopped working for, . They had a bug, that set our… set us back a bit, where people, , , it doesn’t work, I’m not gonna use it, and . What else? , that’s… that’s… that’s really it. , it’s a lot of it, , if… if we could get 100% compliance. it’s pretty easy, but when… , we had people who won’t do Windows Hello because they think the government is stealing their fingerprints, ? , and I’m , this is not how this works, people. It’s not your fingerprint, it’s a digital hardware token that’s saving in your… what is that, the TPM module on your processor, , blah blah blah, but , it’s… just a lot of FUD around that. Uttam Kumaran: , I don’t know, Sam, if you have any initial questions, or if you want to just, , play it back, and we can discuss. Samuel Roberts: The piece that I was thinking about first was the non-workforce one, the customer side. It seems… I was… Okta was chosen because of the… this different vendors issue, and the… the different authentications, is that it? . Jay Heavner: , and , , and we’ve had it since 2018, and the head of marketing at that time is the one who brought it in. If it had been me, I would have brought in, Who is it that they just brought? Auth0. owns Auth0, and we had a conversation with them about that. And they’re , , the juice probably isn’t worth the squeeze to convert from Okta to Auth0, it’s a lot of work, and you’re probably not going to save any money. , Auth0 used to be a much less expensive product. , it’s pretty expensive, . . Katherine Bayless: Auth0 was what we used at the startup I worked for, it did have a big spike in price. Samuel Roberts: I’ve touched on in the past, but I have not recently since then. Alright, and… but there’s still, , a lot of friction with the customers getting through the things, from what I’m. Jay Heavner: , , , last year we had a… we had a… we had a bug last year, it was an Octobug, that they… their product team fixed for us, where… We made… marketing made a bad decision several years ago, where they did not want to… have customers authenticate their email address, because some percentage of customers… when you have 500,000 registrants, you have big number problems. … , 1% of 1% didn’t receive the email, they decided, , let’s not have people authenticate their email address. And then, as Okta matured their product, and we went from… whatever it was to their OIE platform a year or ago. They would not… if you created an account. and you got to a confusing page of optional factors, if you didn’t press continue on that page. It did… it left your account in a stage provision state. Even though they had put their email address in, even though all they had to do was click continue, it didn’t work. And we went back and forth on them and said, , if you’re going to allow customers to not require emails… , they were staged because the email hadn’t been verified. I’m , . If we’ve intentionally said we don’t want email verification, which put that decision aside, good or bad. then why would you leave these customers in this state? we had to build some weird workaround using workflows that would just , if it found someone in this state. it would programmatically deactivate, reactivate their account. what we did this year was we… We’d always been using just the default Okta, I forget what they’re… their widget for login. what we did was we replaced their Create Account widget with a custom widget that just fix that thing for you. The other problem we had is, , CES is one week of year. And customers don’t remember their passwords. . week to the next, ? And people aren’t using… password managers, they’re not… they’re not using any of that. we had a lot of problems with people just not knowing what their login credentials were. And Okta is primarily a security system, it doesn’t give you a lot of information about why you can’t log in, ? Cryptic error messages. one of the things we did this year was we overrode their widget. we checked the error on the back end, and we were displaying a more intelligent error back to the customer. we did that, and it fails, , if it can’t… if it can’t find it, it fails gracefully, because we had an instant… we host it in AWS, that when AWS went down, it didn’t bring Okta down for us. It just, , , it optimistically pushed the error message back to them, they know. And we’ve dropped… Uttam Kumaran: The last I heard, we had dropped. Jay Heavner: customer support requests by, , 80% by doing that, which is a pretty good number, ? The other problem we have is… And I tried to explain to people, even last year when we were getting customer service requests, they’re about 3%. That was our rate, which is still pretty good when you look at a customer-facing IDP that’s, , global. Because a lot of the folks who have problems are… English is a second language. I do believe we’ve got, , all the resource files in there, we translate most of what we can. And I’m , , this isn’t a customer service problem, this is a large number problem, again, where you should always expect that some percentage of people will need customer support. And that’s just a function of staffing customer support to what your metrics say. And one wanted that. They’re , , , we want zero customer support on this. I’m , . , we talked about using magic links, but again, that would require the idea that you’ve got to verify the email. If it wants to be a factor. , whether or not, , , this is my thing with Okta, , if someone puts it in there. I get that you want to verify it, I totally get that, but in the absence of Formal verification, just treated as such, and we went. back and forth on that. we were lately using SMS, because that’s something that’s approachable to people, but then they started charging for that. They got rid of their MSS, or their SMS provider, and , if you want to use it, you have to bring your own in. And… we did a little bit of research on looking at that, but not… not serious. then it’s … , they’ll support anything. They’ll support Duo, or Google, or whatever, and you would think that for CES, this would be something familiar to most of these people, but it really isn’t, which is a little shocking. Uttam Kumaran: I feel email is probably… email magic link is probably the most… Universal, because everybody has to have an email, probably, for other… Jay Heavner: And, , for someone me, that’s friction. I don’t want to wait 3 minutes to get an email. Samuel Roberts: Oh, I agree, I’m the same way, . Jay Heavner: , app does this. I’m , , I have a password here, friend. I’ll just log in, but… , , I agree, especially for something where you’re only logging in to register, and then maybe if you download the mobile app, ? most people probably aren’t doing this a ton. Samuel Roberts: , , . A few times a year. Jay Heavner: , a few times a year. Part of it is our registration system, I don’t know if Catherine’s explained this to you, but, . The only thing we really control is the website, CS.Tech, and it’s, , this big of this universe, ? , and we talked years ago about, , white labeling registration. Just, let’s white label, let’s bring it in. And… their interfaces are really clunky. , last year… you had two buttons, and it was , click here to log in, and click here to register, and I’m , , people don’t know, just have them enter their email address and say. Bun a thing. And, , this year… and they were also… everyone’s… for the most part, they’re redirecting back to us for authentication, redirecting back to Okta. , you don’t have to do that. , you can white-label your own login for Okta. That’s perfectly supported, ? If you want to, or you can create your own customers. Now, we have requirements about that, because We don’t allow… one of our security rules is customer service are not allowed to create one-time passwords because these are not sophisticated people. They would get social engineered in a heartbeat, the only thing they can do is send a password reset. one of our providers, Map Your Show, was creating new accounts with one-time passwords. . Samuel Roberts: The problem with that is. Jay Heavner: Even if they communicate correctly, which is really hard to communicate a password correctly, in my experience. They expire in 7 days. And then when they expire, they get put into a state where they must be acted upon by some customer service agent. , which is all… we told them, , don’t do that. , if you want to create new accounts, here’s the way you do it. You create it, you activate it, you send them the email that forces them to do the enrollment. They have a problem with email, then that’s… that’s a bridge to cross. You’re always going to have some people… email is not… we still believe that email is a guaranteed form of communication here, and I’m , if you realized how fragile SMTP was under the hood, you would never use it for anything, but it is what it is, ? , , it’s a lot of… It’s a lot of big number problems. It’s a lot of trying to… Fixed for low percentage things and creating bigger problems by not really understanding the ramifications of it. , just the idea that you’re always going to have some people. who will require customer service. That’s… you can’t get away from it. Samuel Roberts: Definitely, . Uttam Kumaran: And then, Jay, on our side, who is, , owning the customer service piece? … Jay Heavner: the CES team, there’s a woman there named Alex Flex. she’s the head of customer service. The challenge is. Alex worked for us in marketing years ago, left and came back, and they put her in charge of customer service. She’s never… done a bit of customer service in her life before this. And she understands helping customers, but she doesn’t understand the data metrics of driving a customer service center, ? , the idea that you have… Tickets, and change logs, and closures, and REITs, and all these things. That’s how you track success. To her, success is… Are these going through a ticketing system, by the way, or is it just going to, , a password reset email? It’s just… Uttam Kumaran: Report email. Jay Heavner: Email or phone into… and it’s a third party, it’s largely a third-party system. Samuel Roberts: Something. Jay Heavner: they put front in front of it, which is good, because before they were all using one shared mailbox to access it, , which is another point of risk. , and I don’t believe we could talk to her… I don’t believe there’s a ticketing system under the hood of that. it’s all just tracked through email. And then… Tier 2 of that is… They will kick that back to us. and me or one of the guys on my team will troubleshoot those issues. We built a little AI tool that you give it an email address, and it goes out and it tells you what’s wrong with the account. Uttam Kumaran: That’s the glean tool. Jay Heavner: , that’s one of them. That was for something else. We did another one just for this, and then I was trying to extend the thing, but I got a little bit, … I was trying to make a universal tool that I could pull, , large-level mech, … You could zoom in on a customer, but then, , if someone’s having, , the macro issue we had last year, where customers would be putting in a stage state, . Could I get reporting on that out of this thing? , hey, who’s affected by this? And what’s interesting about that one was they had fixed it for us. They got it fixed before CES last year, and then they had a problem in July a bug that they issued, , a thing for. When they fixed the bug, they undid our change. Which I thought was going to happen, because when you put these one-off changes into a codebase that. something’s gonna wipe it out eventually, ? That’s… that was always my fear on the product, … but it’s… it’s… We’re getting a lot fewer requests this year. We had one come in with someone who couldn’t get an email, and I’m . , the other thing we did with the email. We were sending an email from From Arteme. But we weren’t using a domain that we had properly warmed up and developed. We just created a brand new domain. Uttam Kumaran: , you’ll get spammed. You’ll get put to spam immediately. Jay Heavner: Yep, then we switched over to using Octus, and we thought, , you guys have solved this problem for us, but then they’re just using, one of the big providers under the hood. I’m drawing a blank on the name. And the problem with that one is, it uses some economy of scale send an email over here, it’s not going to try for ours, and Okta wasn’t giving us any transparency into it, ? There was failure, , hey, that email didn’t go to that person, they just. It was optimistic, and it died out there. And they’ve gotten better with some of that stuff, but it’s Syndrid, that’s who they’re using, Syngrid. Uttam Kumaran: , it’s a Twilio. Jay Heavner: , SynGrid’s a perfectly fine tool. , they put a little endpoint up that would let you try to resend the email. by calling it API endpoint, but it’s still, , we couldn’t get any analytics, and I haven’t looked lately to see if they changed it, but there was zero analytics on what the delivery of that was, … , we probably should pull it back in, but to pull back in, we’d want to have a domain that is appropriate, and warmed up, and ready to go, and someone’s really looking at that thing, because that’s a… that’s… It might not be a full-time job, email deliverability, but it’s… it’s work. Katherine Bayless: . , I will say, , just as a side corroboration, , email deliverability in general is something that’s on my radar for next year, because we do not get anywhere near as close to the inbox as we would to, and there’s a lot of room for improvement, but… Jay Heavner: . That’s through SXMC for, , marketing emails. , we have a perf… ces.tech. We own that domain. We don’t use it for hardly anything, , we’ve got a domain sitting there. And even when they were sending the emails from Okta, they were using, . some other random email that they just pulled out of nowhere, and it’s the same with Marketing Cloud. They’re using Katherine Bayless: dash tech.org. Jay Heavner: , and I’m , why would you do that? … Uttam Kumaran: , you’ll have to just separate out, , transactional versus marketing, and then marketing emails, you’ll have to… you should just try to rotate. . , even for us, we have, , a lot of similar Brain Forge domains that we use for, , we do cold email, we don’t do a lot anymore. But that’s very common, but then we still use Brainforge for just, , transactional stuff. But the risk is, is, , if someone sends, , a million emails through your CTA.Tech, and you get put into spam, very… Near impossible to… Jay Heavner: recovered. Katherine Bayless: That’s what has happened, . Uttam Kumaran: transactional emails to multiple hundred thousand people-sized audiences that were not transactional. Jay Heavner: And let’s step outside of this for a second. We also have with, We maintain a lot of inter… we maintain a lot of distribution lists for members and committees and all these people. We’re running that through our O365 instance and using ct.tech to send those. And it hasn’t killed us yet, but , years ago, we would be… HP would blacklist our entire domain because… Of a distribution list where someone was spamming a distribution list, and they flagged us, and then someone’s calling them, hey, please take us off the blacklist. Katherine Bayless: This happened with Panasonic a couple weeks ago. Jay Heavner: And it’s , we need to get those distribution lists out of our core tenet of email, but it’s free. And they don’t have to do any work, why wouldn’t we continue to do this? . Recently, we onboarded a tool, it’s called… something that does… we were using it for… what were you… DMARC reporting. And we bought, , a proper license that it can do DMARC, DKIM, SPI, SPF, all these… The DMARC stuff, we’re still, . everybody wants to dance around DMARC, , one ever really wants to turn DMARC on or off, we’ve been running it in monitor mode now for 30 years, and one’s really looking at that, but . And all the Salesforce Marketing Cloud stuff, none of it’s passing. Any of it, … Bless its heart, , it’s… Katherine Bayless: I know. , , , leave email deliverability writ large is definitely a problem. And , the downstream, , piece, too, is, , we get a less than 1% response on our surveys, and I’m , , , because probably only a fraction of people even get the survey in the first place, ? . Jay Heavner: , last week, I got 3 emails forwarded to me by internal staff from their points of contact with emails that came out of Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Is this email legit? And clean, , members of our corporate board, , hey, is this a… I don’t know… I don’t recognize this domain, is this a legit email? . Katherine Bayless: The good news is that the guy in marketing is very on board with my world domination plans of, , everything that goes out that is not a one-to-one or one-to-few individual conversation should go through Marketing Cloud, and, , once that’s the single outbound channel for this organization, then we can finally start. and solving these problems. , , the room is open next year, but . Uttam Kumaran: in terms of, , initial thoughts, I’m just taking some notes. one is… , on our side, Sam, I just… I shot you some couple things, but one, , . one, I would love to get us in the sample registration flow, we can start to map out each of the flows. , I would love to just create, , a process diagram of, . what different cases hit you, get you into what different flows. It’ll be really clear for us to find the loops. there… it’s gonna depend on, . what… what we find and what’s possible. I don’t know, Jay, it seems we have evaluated from other vendors. There’s still maybe some things to explore, , potentials within Okta. , do you think we should continue to, , push on Okta to see… what’s possible? Do you think we should just… , look outside for potential solutions? , , what… where is your, , gut on this? Jay Heavner: with Okta, I’m… , for workforce stuff, I’m very happy with Okta. It’s a great tool. If I were going to market today, would I pick Okta for our customer data platform? Probably not. , it’s overkill for what we’re trying to do here. I have not looked at that landscape in a long time, and, , if we were… if we were using our JWTs and our access token, there’d be a lot more value there, and I just can’t get these VIN… , we had a call with the mobile app people, and they’re , can you push… our ID into your claim. . And I’m , but why? Help me understand what you’re trying to do here, because you don’t seem to understand OIDC. And , we’ve had this… we had to go on site and help some of our vendors implement OIDC flows. , I’m at the point now where I can build one in 8 minutes. I’ve done it many times, ? But, … , guys, this isn’t hard. You’re hitting an endpoint, you’re getting a token, you’re exchanging token for code, or whatever, or code for token, and, , it’s… It’s… it’s not hard, and then you just… you use that, and, . And we’re still… all these vendors are sideloading data between one another. I’m , you don’t need to do that. You… who’s in front of you, you can pull just that person’s information. You don’t need to pull , 180,000 records out of database and try to sync those every day. , this is… We solved this problem decades ago, guys. Uttam Kumaran: , I’m surprised that Auth0 wasn’t the ticket out here, personally. , we took a hard look at it last year. Jay Heavner: And I still… if it… the problem’s gonna be… If the cost is the same, and there’s implementation, and people are afraid of implementation. I do think it’s… if we were picking the day. prob… probably the thing. I’m supp… there’s gotta be… As expensive as it is. I’m surprised there’s not something else out there, even an open series thing. There are, there are… Uttam Kumaran: There are a few more that I know, I just, … This is just funny, I’ve, , followed a couple of companies in this space. Auth0 is one of them, but Clerk is another one. Jay Heavner: Oh, I haven’t heard that. Uttam Kumaran: Clerk.com, Sam, that’s the only other one I’ve heard of, because we do a lot of work with fast products that do… that are, , launching consumer apps that do a ton of auth, and Clerk is the only one that I’ve heard of recently that is, . People seem to it, but, , that’ll be up to us to figure out. I still think maybe worth us just, , rehashing, or, , at least rehashing what the cost of OptZero could be, at least that… we just can assume that’s, . the baseline, ? Jay Heavner: And we’re paying, at this point, , a little over a quarter million dollars a year to have our customers log in. A lot of that is because we only sign one-year contracts. that thing has gone from probably 260,000 in year… what are we now, 7 or 8? Uttam Kumaran: And is that priced on just a user basis? Not on, , any , , time box? , is there volume for CES, or… Jay Heavner: Okta… , Okta does this weird licensing thing where it’s… Monthly users. we pay for… 900,000 annual users. And , I count if I… Uttam Kumaran: You sub it in. Jay Heavner: if I log in 3 months of the year, I hit it 3 times. 0, and at least you see the broadest come in, and also, frankly. This is something that you could… , I, , knock on wood, you’ve probably run in parallel. , and, , maybe the way you guys get adoption is, , hey, we went ahead and, , this is the same exact thing. And , , the process is a lot easier. This side of the house, now we have reporting. , you can go into Stripe and see, . how many customers are buying stuff. Catherine, we looped this all into your data, and it , , drives. Jay Heavner: itself, because you’re , hey. Uttam Kumaran: We don’t have anything from the Shopify side. Jay Heavner: Where I’d really to unpack is our space selection process in Las Vegas, because it is, the most manual thing you’ve ever seen in your life. Two years ago, I caught a member of our membership team trying to write someone’s credit card number down she could get back to her room and bill. I’m , , , , you can’t do that! And she goes, , what am I supposed to do? And I’m , not that. And we came back, and I went to… at that… we have new leadership. at that point in time, our COO, CFO, and I’m , hey. we need some payment system there they can process these things in real time. And she’s , . They have a process. I’m , but they don’t. , the process is walk them to a computer that is a rented computer, and have them put their information into that thing. And I’m , I wouldn’t put information to a rented computer in Las Vegas. Credit card number. Katherine Bayless: I barely use the ATMs out there. Samuel Roberts: I was gonna say… . Yep. Jay Heavner: , we’re doing a training tomorrow on staff to say, don’t use anything that’s not yours. , , why would it… , they put kiosks around and want people to use these things. I’m , guys, have you never, , read the articles about Black Hat and what they do to those things when they’re out there? . Uttam Kumaran: Two and a half. I feel more comp… , maybe, Sam, I’ll let you go off, but I feel… I feel more confident on the Shopify side, of course. But I don’t know, Sam, , what do you think about some of, , the next steps I described? on the auth side of the house. And , the part of the Shopify stuff we can also probably do in parallel. , maybe, , I’ll let you go first, and then . Samuel Roberts: , , I’m curious to dig into some of the other providers and see, , especially pricing-wise, , I… I… Office Zero, I said, I touched in the past, but I hadn’t touched since, , they’ve been absorbed into Okta, I don’t, , I didn’t know all the different changes there, I would love to do a little bit of a, , discovery on some of that and see. because I know some of the tools that I’ve used, but it’s been more for, , startup stuff and more for, , not the numbers you guys are talking, I don’t really know the, . how that scales for certain, , I… , clerk, I don’t know, I’ve heard something… people say it’s expensive, I’ve heard some people say it’s perfect for what you need, , if it… I don’t know where those are gonna settle based on the numbers, and what else is out there. Jay Heavner: , what I about Clerk is they charge you on real. They’re charging you 2 cents per MAU, the first 10,000 are free. . Samuel Roberts: That’s new. Jay Heavner: I’m… I’m a much bigger fan on pay for the customers you have, not the customers that you want, ? , totally. Uttam Kumaran: The other thing, Jay, is, , this is the one thing we do, we negotiate with a lot of vendors, and we’ll come in and be . We’re gonna… we’re considering switching. you need to make this, , worthwhile for us to switch to you, and especially, , that’s something that we’re… once I get an understanding of the features, we’ll start to just put these folks against each other, because they’re gonna want the business, and the Octave person, whoever is gonna… is gonna lose all that, they should throw in OptZero for free. , we should push them to start doing these types of things. Jay Heavner: . And, , , I’ve been… , Okta, in… They’ve gone… I don’t know, I was really, really impressed with them, and they still are the market leader, , but, , they’re not nearly the company they were 3 years ago. . , we’ve had a lot more problems with them. I was shocked that Author was going to be expensive, but then they charged us, . I have to pay support twice. There’s a lot of double charges, because we have both workforce and customer, and I’m , , should we just roll it all into the customer, Denny, and then I’ll save the 60 grand on the workforce? I’m , , , but you have adapt… you don’t have some of the SKUs there, then you have to spend that money, and I’m , you’re really nickeling and diming me for… what it is, and we threatened to go with intra. I was never gonna go with intra, but we threatened it. They gave me, , a 40-page white paper while it’s free, it’s not free, and I’m , , I’m… I have interest in trying to manage back to… The nice thing about Okta is… we don’t spend any time really managing it. And it’s intuitive and simple enough now it’s gotten a lot more complex than what it used to be. Uttam Kumaran: you’re in that they own, they own this, , enterprise. single sign-on, but you’re in that I don’t think they were innovating nearly as fast. Jay Heavner: And they keep making changes, and the changes break things, and they’re not always intuitive, and , we weren’t really looking for complexity, ? We’re looking for simple to manage, too, and… they’re really into the public sector now, and , when I talked to my rep, she goes, what we do now is we do everything public sector first. And because they always have the toughest requirements, then we come behind that for business, and I’m , , but then you’re doing things that I don’t care about. Samuel Roberts: , it’s just a lot of overkill. Jay Heavner: Lot of everyone… , they’re really into, oh, some governance now, and I’m , , that’s just not where we are. We don’t care about governance. Samuel Roberts: , once you come all the way to the customer side, it’s , , . Through workforce to customers, , , from… , I see what you’re saying. Jay Heavner: Alright, cool. . Uttam Kumaran: I feel , Catherine, , where we’ll land is, , , Jay, what I mentioned is, , we’re just gonna drive towards, , putting, , a memo together. Maybe have a mix of, , things we discover on the Okta side. vendors that we can evaluate. I was , let’s timebox it to, , the end of this week, where we just put, , a bunch of stuff we’ve learned. Jay Heavner: Let’s be honest, you could rewrite our store, Fastions Graduate, a memo, if we’re being really honest, there’s not a lot of. Uttam Kumaran: it’s not… it’s not really about the memo, more in, , I… we need to… we have an opportunity to find out… Katherine Bayless: . Past, present, future, and we’re just, . Uttam Kumaran: Write something down that… And then that’s also an artifact that, if we need to get budget or approval or something, where the team is… we’re the most, , knowledgeable in the room about it, that’s more of the reason. I don’t want to do, , a month-long discovery on something we don’t need to do, but even for us, just to understand, , what is the… what’s the end of it, ? But you’re… , , I feel , definitely. On the Okta side, a little bit, obviously, on the Shopify side, . They’ve made it very, very easy to sell stuff on the internet, ? Katherine Bayless: But , , , , that was what I was saying earlier to Jay, too, is … there is meaningful utility in the asset of just, , being able to give, , third-party opinions on, , you’re just doing this dumb, guys, , to leadership, ? , we can continue to make the case that, , we need to invest in better technology, and technology generally, but , , we need to be able to show them the death by a thousand cuts that we’re living because of these, , seemingly innocuous decisions around Legality that. Jay Heavner: , the one-off exceptions, because… security is… is hard, but it’s not. If you give me… We spend 7 minutes together. and I’ll help you with it, then you can have passwordless login, , you’re gonna have to reboot your computer occasionally, and there might be some things that it’s gonna say, hey, you can’t… you can’t do that, or you have a patch that’s due, but, , my wife works at AWS. I watched her do a unbox a computer a few weeks ago, and she has to… 100% herself. She cannot get any help with it. And… it was a little arduous, but I’m , , she’s not a technical person, she’s a meeting planner. , there are opportunities here to improve this stuff and just, , drive back to a realistic baseline. If you’ve got to carve out exceptions for senior, senior leadership, that’s fine. We carve out those special cases, we put them on the risk register, but then 99.9% of the staff play through normal things. Katherine Bayless: I feel very excited by this conversation. Uttam Kumaran: Let’s see what we can… , let’s see what we just… it’s a totally achievable… it’s totally achievable, ? , , I feel if we can nail it for you guys and take some of that off your plate, , more than happy to, . At least we’ll do another round of, , thorough discovery to see what the options are. Jay Heavner: , everyone here thinks it’s rocket science, and it’s , , it’s just making sandwiches, guys, we’re not doing anything really that hard. Samuel Roberts: I understand that. Katherine Bayless: Jay, I did add you to the Brainforge channel. that way, if there’s any back-and-forth thing, , … Welcome, welcome, welcome. Uttam Kumaran: Perfect. Alright, then we’ll get back to you guys, and then Catherine, I will message you, I’m from Polyatomic about rescheduling. , I will message you as on that. Katherine Bayless: . And then… Uttam Kumaran: , anything you can help us, Srini with on that, remember. Katherine Bayless: I’ll send him a note now and see if maybe, , if he wants to hop on a quick Zoom, I’m I can probably either point him in the direction or realize, , oh , , , let me get you somebody who knows. . Uttam Kumaran: , perfect. Alright, thanks you all, I really, really appreciate the time. Jay Heavner: Thanks, guys, appreciate it. I don’t expect.