Content Data Marketing Adopts Authlete for Multi-Tenant CIAM Platform

We're excited to announce that Content Data Marketing Inc. (CDM) has chosen Authlete, an OAuth and OpenID Connect (OIDC) backend service, to implement OAuth and OIDC into its Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) solution.

Founded in 2020 as a joint venture by KODANSHA Ltd., TOPPAN Inc., and CARTA COMMUNICATIONS Inc., CDM develops and operates Uniikey—a SaaS-based CIAM solution. To renew Uniikey’s identity infrastructure through in-house development, CDM adopted Authlete for its OAuth/OIDC implementation, achieving lower operational costs and greater flexibility.

Background and Challenges

Uniikey is a multi-tenant CIAM solution designed to support multiple services. With Uniikey, service providers can manage customer identity and access information centrally and enable Single Sign-On (SSO) across various services. It also offers advanced features for creating new businesses using identity data, like content monetization and marketing tools. Today, Uniikey is used by companies with diverse offerings—from e-commerce and mobile apps to media sites—serving millions of users.

Since launching in 2020, Uniikey has relied on an external vendor’s customer data management platform. But as it grew, limitations with the vendor’s system became a challenge—especially around cost, performance, and customization. For instance, any time a client company of Uniikey wanted to add new identity attributes, it required code-level changes, which made development less flexible.

Solution

To address these issues, CDM decided to rebuild Uniikey in-house to achieve better cost control, improved scalability, greater flexibility, and the ability to quickly meet customer needs. For authentication and authorization, CDM considered adopting either Authlete, Keycloak, or Amazon Cognito while focusing on developing the core application.

After weighing the options, CDM ultimately selected Authlete. CDM found that Keycloak would be too burdensome to manage and operate, and that Amazon Cognito had quota-based limitations on processing performance. Authlete, on the other hand, met all CDM’s feature requirements, allowed them to fully delegate OAuth/OIDC implementation and operation, and could scale with future business growth.

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Outcome

The revamped Uniikey, developed in-house using Authlete, went live in December 2024. Since then, it’s been adopted for several services, including Tokyo Metropolitan Television Broadcasting Corp’s viewer membership service and the Tennozu Area CRM Construction Project. KODANSHA, an existing Uniikey user, also launched Kodansha ID after the platform upgrade, unifying access across the group’s various content and strengthening its marketing infrastructure.

CDM realized the following results through the utilization of Authlete:

• Compliance with open standards: Authlete actively contributes to the development of OAuth and OIDC standards and quickly implements new specifications. By using Authlete, Uniikey can support the latest OAuth/OIDC specifications as necessary. Additionally, because Uniikey’s OAuth/OIDC API is fully standards-compliant, service providers can easily adopt the solution.
• Streamlined development and operations: Authlete’s SaaS model accelerated development and reduced CDM's workload.
• Better cost control: By using Authlete just for OAuth/OIDC and handling most other parts in-house, CDM can keep external vendor costs low and maintain greater control over its spending. This helps CDM cut costs through its own efforts.
• Greater flexibility: Uniikey, built on Authlete’s headless OAuth/OIDC engine, leverages this architecture to give its customers the flexibility to design user interfaces that match their brand. Since Authlete doesn’t limit how member or tenant information is managed, CDM has complete freedom in how it designs and implements solutions—making it possible to tailor data storage and operations for each customer.

Comment from Yoshiaki Kashima, Deputy General Manager, Solution Division, Content Data Marketing Inc.

“Before we adopted Authlete, we could only customize Uniikey within the limits of our previous vendor’s platform, which made it hard to meet our customers’ needs fully. We also used to build OAuth flows ourselves, but thanks to Authlete’s robust APIs and high standards compliance, we were able to hand off that responsibility entirely.

It’s a relief that Authlete handles our OAuth/OIDC implementation. In addition, we’ve reduced maintenance costs, which has been extremely helpful. We’re committed to continuing to provide a stable CIAM platform.”

Read more customer success stories here.