Australian identity and access management company First Point Global will look to hire engineering staff in New Zealand for its new Auckland operation.
Founder and CEO John Havers says the company is also about to move its first staff member over from Australia to man the new office.
The move coincides with a new partnership with US company UnboundID to launch a consumer identify management platform into Australia, New Zealand and the Asia Pacific region.
The UnboundID Identity Data Platform enables enterprises to store, manage, protect, and share customer identity data in real-time across their entire application infrastructure. By transforming customer identity data into a reusable, shared service, the cost of maintaining and protecting the data can be reduced, and the data can be used to deliver a highly personalised customer experience, improving customer satisfaction and loyalty.
“Connected services allow companies to increase their average revenue per customer and governments to lower the cost of delivering services to citizens,” Havers says. “Despite massive pent-up demand for these services, many organisations are frustrated by their inability to manage individual consumer and citizen Permissions, Preferences and Privacy – something existing enterprise identity management systems were never designed to do.”
First Point Global already has New Zealand customers, though Havers won't name them. “They're among the top 100 companies.” First Point Global historically has focused on the financial sector, telcos, government and manufacturing.
“Connected services have been talked about for the past five years but it is just now that customers are beginning to seriously implement them,” Havers says. “All the components are coming together and making achievable what hasn't been so till now. Sharing data had a cost that companies were struggling with.
“What we are doing is like concentrating silos within a business.”
According to Lori Robinson, Research VP, Gartner: “An effective consumer IAM program is a competitive differentiator in today's digital business landscape, but managing consumer identities introduces unique challenges. Many organisations have well-established enterprise IAM initiatives focused on the management of employee identities. However, IAM solutions designed for employee populations cannot simply be repurposed for consumer populations.”*
The UnboundID platform improves the performance and the reliability of services by consolidating an organisation’s consumer or citizen identity data and making it immediately available – along with enforcing individual Permission, Preference and Privacy attributes – to connected services across different digital platforms.
Under the partnership, the companies will invest in both training personnel and intercompany processes. The investment will establish First Point Global as architecture experts on the UnboundID consumer identity platform and as a technical support centre of excellence.