With Okta being a 100% channel focussed business in the Middle East, Turkey and Africa, partnerships have been key to its success.Justin Doo, Okta’s Territory Manager for the region, tells us how channel partners help the company satisfy its customers.
Okta is the leading independent provider of identity for the enterprise.
The Okta Identity Cloud enables organisations to securely connect the right people to the right technologies at the right time.
With over 6,000 pre-built integrations to applications and infrastructure providers, Okta customers can easily and securely use the best technologies for their business.
Over 7,000 organisations, including 20th Century Fox, JetBlue, Nordstrom, Slack, Teach for America and Twilio, trust Okta to help protect the identities of their workforces and customers.
ITC talked to Justin Doo, Territory Manager for Middle East, Turkey and Africa for Okta, about the importance of channel partnerships to the company.
Could you outline how your company works with channel partners?
I look after Middle East, Turkey and Africa and we are a 100% channel focused organisation in this region. All of our business is executed with channel partners. That is a mixture of larger organisations, the big four, some large corporate reseller organisations, and the more niche players who have specific verticals or skill sets that they execute within.
We’ve therefore got very good coverage and in terms of reach, and how we work with them, it really does depend on the partner’s skillset. If a partner has enabled themselves on the Okta solutions by going through the certification process, they’re comfortable with positioning the value proposition and technical perspective and able to run through critical concepts, then they tend to be very independent.
Then you have the partners who have a great relationship base, but don’t necessarily have the skills in the early part of their engagement. In that case, we would do a lot of the selling with them and work with their pre-sales and sales teams to help position the Okta value set.
So there are different levels of partnership?
Yes. What we consistently do regardless of the level of partnership, is make sure we focus on adding value to the customer and sell with the partner.
If the customer has no preference in terms of their partners, then we would bring in a partner who we know wants to skill up.
Can you explain which territories Okta operates in?
We have offices all over the world but in terms of EMEA we’ve got offices in Germany, France, Benelux, Sweden and our EMEA HQ in the UK. In some territories, we use Territory Management programmes. For example, I am the Territory Manager for the Middle East, Turkey and Africa. The territory managers access markets with remote engagement and manage business development with partners and distribution.
Typically, as it is in my case, this is with people that we’ve worked with previously, where we already have contacts and we have some ‘currency’. As it would be impossible for us to cover everywhere in one hit with this strategy, it’s key that we select the right markets to go into based upon where we think the market expectancy is as well as the market maturity.
Is there any difference in how you approach your channel partners in the Middle East compared to Africa?
There’s no difference at all. The partner skill sets and profiles tend to be quite similar. There are the ‘pure play’ security partners who are taking Okta into business on a security platform through security engagement. And then there are the partners who are more ‘workflow, process’ type organisations, where people can work in things like ‘WorkDay’.
We plug into that environment with them. Sometimes we work with people across HR and business process capability and often there can be numerous partners in one region, many of whom don’t actually compete with each other and sell to different parts of the business. That’s fairly common across Middle East and Africa.
How do your partners effectively deliver your solutions to end-users?
Okta is 100% cloud based – and fully compatible with on-prem – so something we do as part of the provisioning of the package is enabling our partners to have their own demo tenants within the Okta environment. They do demonstrations to customers using our infrastructure and then when it comes to delivering the solution to customers, they have experienced the Okta environment for themselves without spending too much time customising a tenant.
Partners either use our skill set or their own skill set to do the more complex implementation and integration work with some of the applications. Not every customer has a complete suite of business apps that are cloud based, some of them will have the need to integrate into on-premise applications.
From that perspective, professional services work will be delivered by the partner or by one of our authorised delivery service partners depending on where that partner is in its certification journey.
So the partners are able to work with customers to train them to use the solutions on a case-by-case basis?
Yes and customers also have access to incentivised training with Okta. Within their own management dashboard, customers can enrol their own admin employees into self-paced learning. It’s critical that they understand how to use the technology to its full advantage; the more they get out of it, the more value it drives and the more successful they are as customers.
Which regions do you consider offer Okta the most opportunities?
Honestly, I don’t differentiate. Okta’s technologies and services can benefit every organisation. We work with small businesses, education, government and enterprises. There isn’t one specific vertical or geography. Okta benefits any organisation that’s looking to deliver a better user experience to everyone, whether it is their customers, their partners or their employees.
We layer security in such a way that means that people don’t have to interact with it all the time. It therefore doesn’t impact on what they do and helps to make their life easier.
This includes organisations that are streamlining their own IT, which is pretty much every company you talk to, and anybody who’s involved in growing their businesses, including through acquisition. They acquire a whole array of new problems when it comes to IT such as silos of data and identities. Okta has got a very strong business proposition in helping them harmonise all of that in one platform.
We don’t have any regions that we think are more suited than others. Any organisation is a potential customer for Okta.
How would you say that Okta integrates with other technology partners to make your solutions more powerful and efficient for customers?
The core part of our business is the Okta Integration Network, or OIN, for short. The OIN is currently around six and a half thousand pre-built integrations out-of-the-box. If you are a customer, and you’re investing in Okta technologies, there’s a directory of integrations available.
If your HR solution is SAP Success Factors, for example, we have a deep integration with them. If you already have Office 365, we have a pre-built integration, as well as Box, Palo Alto and many others.
Because Okta is an integration layer, vendors come to us and work with our OIN team to get technologies embedded within our environments. We’re vendor agnostic and therefore don’t go into the customer and tell them that ‘the only way you’re going to get past this is if you keep that’. We connect people to things and things to applications.
From that perspective, our integrations are integral to the success of Okta. In addition to that, the Okta platform, and the Okta service, have become extremely attractive to other vendors. We deploy their technology much quicker than they do in many respects. And we make sure that it’s consumed in a secure and measured way.
They don’t then have to buy hours and hours of professional services having custom connectors written which then have to be updated when someone’s platform changes. It’s win-win all round.