Macromill Group Modernizes c/IAM and Gains Control to Make Identity Log-in Their Own

About Macromill: Global marketing research firm

Headquartered in Tokyo, the Macromill Group has a research panel network reaching over 90 countries and regions. Macromill has grown since 2000 from a pioneering online marketing research firm in Japan by expanding into Southeast Asia and beyond by embracing digital technologies, expanding its service offerings, and strategically acquiring and partnering with other leading companies in the industry.

Challenges: 25 years of disparate, custom authentication systems

Macromill for 25 years built their own authentication/authorization systems for different groups and projects and while they served the purpose and actually did a good job, they did not follow standards, used different logic and flows depending on the year, the purpose, and the project.

Imagine the varying assortment of disparate authentication and authorization systems Macromill tried to make work from 25 years of existence. A small change could often expand into a time draining exercise that took too long to resolve.

For example if we wanted to go “passwordless”, we would have to go around and manually update 20-30 different authentication systems. Users were often required to remember multiple sets of credentials for different systems. The experience was not optimal for our millions of staff, clients, and panelists.

Victor Huang, Product Manager, works on the Macromill Identities Realms project, or MIR for short.

Victor and team were tasked to create a unified identity platform to replace multiple homegrown and commercial solutions. The goal is to make log-ins much simpler and easy for all audiences; employees (staff), clients (those requesting surveys), and panelists (survey respondents).

Solution: Ory: All-in-one AuthN/Z, flexible, with responsive support

Macromill evaluated Auth0 prior to this authentication consolidation project, but chose not to move forward with them because they didn’t have a hosted fine-grained authorization solution that was included and required an additional purchase. Macromill evaluated other vendors but none gave them the flexibility and customization that Ory did.

Why choose Ory?

Ory provided the all-in-one package. Fine-grained authorization, flexible APIs, choices on how to deliver authentication to Macromill’s different audiences. One of the most attractive things about Ory was how receptive to Macromill’s individual needs the team was. The Ory team was very responsive and willing to help set up new resources to meet requirements.

We needed technical expertise to help guide us through the optimal way to accomplish our goals and the Ory team was more than helpful! That continues to be true today months after purchase. The Ory team is always responsive, always available, and very helpful in supporting our project.

Victor Huang, Product Manager, Macromill

Results: Ory delivers huge time savings, reliability, easy customization, and excellent support

“Had we not gone with Ory we likely would have built ourselves. Which in hindsight would have been a monumental undertaking. Researching what it would take to build ourselves took 3 months and we estimated that it would take roughly a year to build,” stated Victor. “Ory has drastically reduced the time to benefit. We were able to immediately begin migrating groups over to Ory, saving huge amounts of time and people.”

Victor continues, “We have had absolutely no issue since launching Ory, it just works as intended. Everything is performing exactly as planned.” Ory has been very responsive when Macromill has questions or inquiries about new and potentially better ways of doing things.

Macromill continues to move toward more advanced authentication and authorization approaches including using OpenID Connect (OIDC). Victor and team are empowered to customize their solution now and in the future to better meet the evolving needs of their customers, staff, and panelists.

Would you recommend Ory to your peers and colleagues?

“We have received great service, very responsive. Ory has been there with us even over weekend launches. Incredible to get that level of support,” explained Victor. The solution technically has been very sound. No issues experienced and Macromill expects that to continue in the future.

We would highly recommend Ory to organizations seeking to modernize their identity and access management systems. Ory gave us the freedom to customize and control how we deliver log-ins to our different audiences. Other commercial alternatives were simply too limiting and expensive.

Victor Huang, Product Manager, Macromill