ENTERPRISE TECHNOLOGY
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 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
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. 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.
Is there any difference in how you
approach your channel partners in
the Middle East compared to Africa? So the partners are able to work with
customers to train them to use the
solutions on a case-by-case basis?
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. 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.
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
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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