The customer
Gibus is a world-leading Italian manufacturer of awnings and pergolas. It sells through a network of more than eight thousand dealers worldwide — a business whose commercial reach is far larger than its payroll, and whose systems therefore have to be reachable by people the company does not employ.
In 2019 the company had no identity and access management system. Access to shared material was arranged as the need arose, and the reason to start was simple: security.
Seven years, five steps
What follows is not a programme that was designed up front and then executed. It is a sequence of steps, each of which solved the problem in front of it and left the next one possible.
2019 — Shared documents. The first step was the smallest: giving controlled access to documents held in SharePoint. One application, one problem, solved.
2020 — The reserved area. A private area for the dealer network, which is where the question stops being about documents and becomes about identity: who these people are, who says so, and what they may reach.
2020 to today — Application integration. From there, applications were brought behind the platform one at a time. This step never closed, and that is the point: it is a rhythm rather than a project with an end date.
2023 — Salesforce as the source. Dealers and shops live in the CRM. Rather than maintaining a second list of the same people, Monokee began taking them from Salesforce directly — the orchestrator reading the commercial system of record and turning it into access, without anybody creating accounts by hand.
2025 — Internal users. The last population to arrive was the company’s own staff, via Entra ID. Employees, dealers, designers and shops ended up behind one platform, which is the opposite of the order most organisations follow.
The first three steps are access management. The last two are identity orchestration — and the second half was possible because the first had already been built.
The recognition
In 2023 the project won Best Enterprise IAM Project at KuppingerCole’s European Identity and Cloud Conference — an award judged on what a deployment achieved, not on what a vendor announced. It arrived while the programme was still running, which is the honest way to read it: the recognition was for a way of working, not for a finished project.
What it produced
- Dozens of integrated applications, where at the start there were none.
- Users: from 2,500 to more than 8,000.
- Self-registration for designers, dealers taken from the CRM, and internal users.
- Access management extended by the orchestrator, rather than replaced by it.
- Seven years of collaboration with no change of technology stack.
That last point is the one worth pausing on. Nothing here required a migration, a cutover weekend, or a decision to replace what was already working. Each step was small enough to finish, and each one left the estate in a state that made the following step easier — which is why the platform chosen in 2019 is still the platform in use today.
Monokee gives us the ability to take control of our internal and external identities like never before.
— Alberto Bottelli, Director of IT department, Gibus
Where to go next
The incremental pattern is described on the IAM modernisation page, and the dealer-network side of it on B2B and supply chain identity.