CyberCX says partners face unfair competition from professional service-heavy vendors

Partners are facing competition with vendors that have a strong professional services focus, according to CyberCX executive director Michael Leonard.

CRN spoke to Leonard at Oktane22, Okta’s recent identity event in San Francisco about how CyberCX’s has been able to avoid friction as an Okta partner.

“The main challenge with some of the other organisations is that they are very, very professional services (PS) heavy themselves, therefore we're competing with them and trying to sell the same product at the same time to customers,” Leonard said.

“Okta is quite good a partner in that respect because of the fact that they don't have that very strong go-to-market and want to do all the PS. They're quite happy for partners to do this and they enable the partners to do so as well.”

Leonard suggested that this has not always been the case in partnerships with other vendors.

“Another big organisation which will remain nameless, they've got a massive professional services organisation, and when we're tendering or when we were tendering, I should say because we are no longer a partner of theirs, we would compete against them. And they would say, ‘I could bring in a team of 1000’ and I have a team of 50. That's not really a fair comparison,” he said.

While Leonard was clear that the partnership with Okta is largely supportive and positive in nature, he did highlight the need to tighten the structure of the business and the partnership into the future.

“At the moment it is a little bit fast and loose, we are a little bit fluid, but the pace of innovation is increasing dramatically, so we can't really afford to have that loose engagement anymore.”

Earlier this month, Okta announced new plans for its partner program for 2023 with new incentives, enablement and resources for partners.

According to Leonard, one of the key changes that he is looking for as an Okta partner is a clearer understanding of the new capabilities and features set to be released, so that the organisation can better prepare its professional services team to support customers.

“We want to own the relationship with the customer as much as possible, but we may not be able to do what we need to do on day one. So, it's making sure that we understand in a structured way, this is the areas where Okta is going to focus and for how long, this is the areas where CyberCX is going to focus and owning the relationship and everything from there, and essentially making sure that there's no grey areas that there's no friction between the organisations,” he said.

Velvet-Belle Templeman travelled to San Francisco for Oktane22 as a guest of Okta.