Okta begins additional Aussie investment after US$1bn in AWS marketplace sales
Craig McGregor, director of partners and alliances at Okta ANZ is beginning to expand the Aussie team.
Identity and access management vendor Okta is expanding its footprint down under after it recently hit US$1 billion in aggregate sales over the past four years in AWS Marketplace.
Craig McGregor director of partners and alliances at Okta ANZ spoke to CRN Australia exclusively about its expansion plans. He said this billion dollar achievement is “just scratching the surface” and they’ve already begun to invest in more local resourcing.
Only a few weeks ago, Okta appointed Nina Colley, as the senior alliance partnership manager.
“She's going be enhancing or driving the AWS relationship in ANZ,” he said.
“We already have someone in Australia managing that, but he's an APJ resource and so he's getting dragged into other parts of the region to replicate some of the success here. We really felt like we needed to double down there.”
The other strategic piece for Okta in Australia and New Zealand, McGregor explained is to build repeatable programs out into the marketplace via AWS Marketplace and have “best of breed” solutions in those programs.
McGregor said he wants to have conversations with partners around having a multi-vendor security program.
"The vision that I would have for our AWS partnership is to do even more of the stuff we're doing now, which is the joint sales engagement,” he explained.
“Bringing them in early in the sales cycle and vice versa. Getting leverage from each other and customers and ultimately driving AWS marketplace revenue as a result. But strategically, building some creative and repeatable programs in market that helps with our common competitive landscape.”
Okta’s partner ecosystem strategy
Okta has more than 100 official signed up partners, and McGregor said the company has a strategy of going “deeper with fewer”.
“We've done a lot of work with our distributor and NextGen around defining who's going to be the focus. The reality is you can't be all things to all people, especially in a one-on-one approach,” he said.
“With our most important partners our strategy is to give them a level of differentiation based on what they're doing with Okta and potentially other solutions of which we are a part of. You can't just do the same thing with every one of their competitors and expect to get real focus, in my experience.”
There are three categories of focus partners for Okta, McGregor explained, firstly global system integrators (SI).
“There are global SIs that are really committed to us on a global level and increasingly on Australian level. The ones that were really being proactive with are Accenture, KPMG and Deloitte,” he said.
“They're doing a lot of great things with Okta in North America and Europe, and we're looking at replicating a bunch of those around reference architectures and so forth [in ANZ]. But there's a number of great customer engagements with all of those 3G sites.”
The second category is the Australian-based SI, MSP community, which McGregor said a number of those is “critical” to them.
“Sekuro, CyberCX, Versent, now a part of Telstra, The Missing Link is a big partner of ours.”
The third category of partners are organisations that McGregor say are critical to Okta’s customer identity solutions.
“The Auth0 side of our business, which was an acquisition two or three years ago, we're now bringing back the Auth0 brand because it's so prominent in the developer community,” he said.
“There's a couple of partners, ThunderLabs and Kodez who are very much in that space, lead with Okta and Auth0 and have great services capabilities around to that platform.”