Identity giant Okta’s channel chiefs have discussed channel plans, partnerships and last year's Auth0 acquisition with CRN, ahead of their Oktane22 conference next week.
Oktane22 will be held in San Francisco on November 8 to 10 and will focus on the future of identity, security and risks and zero trust transformation. It will also involve a partner summit.
Okta acquired identity vendor Auth0 in March 2021 for US$6.5b to address a broader set of identity use cases.
In May this year, Okta named Phil Goldie as their new ANZ boss after Graham Sowden retired.
In 2020, South Australian and security specialist Insync Solutions was contracted to deploy Okta Identity Cloud to all South Australian public schools to manage education applications and resources for 280,000 staff and students across the state.
Okta’s Australian partners include Deloitte, Accenture, KPMG, as well as NextGen Distribution, which was appointed in 2020 as Okta’s first ANZ distributor.
CRN sat down with two of the company’s channel chiefs for an update about their strategy and the identity market within Australia. We spoke to senior vice president of global partners and alliances, Bill Hustad, who joined Okta 2 months ago and local ANZ channel chief Todd Parsons, who joined Okta 6 months ago.
What is your local and global channel strategy?
Parsons: From a local standpoint, the main message right now is that we're building a new team here locally. So, myself and the team members have been here now for approximately six months. If you look at identity today; there are two fundamental types of identity, there's workforce and customer. We are working with our partner community to move the conversation from a traditional security standpoint to starting to talk about experiences.
When you're looking at customers that are making large digital transformations, or how they architect different environments and improve the experiences, it opens up the conversation to a wider set of partners.
We're looking to build a partner community and ecosystem that's focused around how we can make that experience better. That might mean we're working with a multitude of different people that either develop the applications, they help migrate those applications, they help migrate organisations to different clouds, they have hybrid models. It is looking at an ecosystem around that, they may not necessarily ever transact sell something from Okta, but helps in that customer experience.
We look at all the elements, including regional coverage, capability, ability to deploy when and where we need it. We are looking at the people that are involved in the marketplace, primarily around those actions and motions. So, there's a lot of work for us to do here locally to execute on that, and to get the community activated and motivated to work with us. But I think in general, there's some really good alignment around what we're doing globally and locally.
MSPs are being encouraged to evolve their security story, shifting from a technical security focus to more business-oriented approach. Does Okta resonate with this?
Hustad: I've been here for two months, and what I've been focused on is what is our story internally and externally about why we partner? What is the value to our customers in our partnerships?
We've narrowed that down to what I call the six motions that matter. What are the things that we want partners to do that we also feel create really good intimacy with our customers and creates a kind of a winning situation for all three?
The six things are; we want partners to find this business, we want partners to develop, specifically around our new customer identity solution. We think that that's really a clear opportunity to get closer to our developer persona within all our partners, in which we help them with that process to understand more what they can do with identity, and it gets kind of innately built in the applications that they're building for customers. The third is, we want them to influence, they have incredible, long-lasting relationships with customers.
We want them to deliver post sales success and implement and drive adoption around identity and Okta, but also build those offerings and solutions.
And then I see some of those actually maturing into the fifth thing we want to see from partners, which is manage, and I believe it's a really big opportunity when we think about the MSP MSSP market.
Lastly, we want our partners to transact, but make it really easy for customers where it makes sense the easiest way, and what works for them being customer oriented more than what works for the partner in some sense.
What has the Auth0 acquisition meant for Okta?
Hustad: We acquired Auth0 over a year ago.
The market logic for that acquisition was that we were on a collision course. They were really starting around customer intelligence and it was obvious they had to work towards work intelligence, and we were starting at work and working our way to customer. So, it really was a great acquisition for the company. I think what you have to do over time is understand what the unique differences are in the market, and how you go to market with them. Our Auth0 product is now customer identity (CI). When we talked about CI, that is the legacy Auth0 product, and all the kind of new features and functions we've been adding to it. And then you have the traditional workforce product, which is traditional off Okta, the older Okta, plus extended workforce, which is the Okta CIAM (customer identity access management) product.
The problems that each of these products are solving in the market is uniquely different, but they're both products that can solve things for the same company.
Parsons: We have built our partner community traditionally with that security focus around workforce. And I think this acquisition opens up a conversation now to, not just our existing partners, because they're also looking at evolving into that space, but also looking at the partners that are building those applications.
So, a lot of opportunity for new partners that are working in that space to come and work with us.
Are there any significant chapters to come in the hybrid work story that security resellers and partners should be readying for?
Parsons: The whole world of COVID has obviously driven companies to digitally transform to figure out how they can digitally interact with customers. How do they get to market in different ways, with the different environment that we're all in? I think that trend obviously lends well to what we do, and I think the challenge is just the speed at which all of that's happening.
It's a real opportunity for us because we've got to scale our organisation and scale our ecosystem to meet that opportunity.
We have evolved in a workforce identity security environment. So, a lot of our strong partners today have built successful businesses in looking at the security framework for organisations.
Has Okta seen a difference in the adoption of solutions between small, medium or large businesses?
Parsons: When you look at born-in-the-cloud digital natives, obviously the conversation is quite a different one than if we're going to talk to a large financial institution or government.
We specifically build separate sales motion, or not separate, but focused sales motions, focused ecosystems around those types of plays. It's building an organisation that can work and meet those people where they want to be. So particularly in the case of digital natives, AWS plays an enormous role for us.
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