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Okta appoints NEXTGEN as first ANZ distie
Thu, 13th Feb 2020
FYI, this story is more than a year old

Okta, an enterprise identity solutions vendor, has formed a new partnership with NEXTGEN, its first value-added distributor (VAD) in Australia and New Zealand (ANZ).

The move comes as part of an expansion of Okta's local go-to-market strategy as the company continues to expand its business in ANZ.

“As organisations around the world continue to recognise how critical identity is to their digital transformation strategies, Okta is investing in global expansion to support these forward-looking initiatives,” says Okta Asia Pacific general manager Graham Sowden.

“Bringing on a distributor is key to helping us achieve our goal and we are excited to be partnering with NEXTGEN. They bring a unique differentiator as a value-add distributor and will focus on our emerging segment and help us scale through security channel partners.

Okta's partnership with NEXTGEN will provide Okta's Australia and New Zealand-based current and future customers, with the company's latest technology and support through local security channel partners.

Key benefits of the partnership include access to partners, resources, recruitment, onboarding and training support.

NEXTGEN will enable the company to broaden its reach in ANZ and power more companies with the ability to securely use any technology.

“At NEXTGEN, we're focused on working with the world's leading application providers and are, therefore, selective about the technology partners we choose to work with,” says NEXTGEN Group CEO John Walters.

“Okta is the clear market leader in the identity space as a result of their ecosystem, best-of-breed platform, adoption, holistic approach, and vision. We're excited to support Okta in its global expansion efforts, and to support our ecosystem of security channel partners with the necessary resources to ensure the organisations they work with are successful.

Last month, Okta released a report on the state of digitisation across ANZ.

According to the report, digitisation has taken hold of the workplace and the home as many people access the digital versions of services businesses offer across many different industries.

Learning is a top priority, and micro-learning is taking off. Employees also want low cost, flexible education opportunities they can fit into their busy schedules, and LinkedIn Learning and Grammarly led the way.

Furthermore, organisations are deploying more apps for more purposes. This year, the number of apps per customer is up 6% from last year – 10% of Okta's customers now use 200 apps or more to power productive, secure collaboration.

That diversity of application deployment represents technology as a core component of every business strategy, no matter the industry, and apps and integrations play a key role in fuelling our modern workforce.

The 2020 report shows a shakeup of new apps dominating the workforce, with Snowflake, Atlassian Opsgenie, and Splunk all making the list of fastest-growing apps for the first time.

Best-of-breed collaboration tools like Zoom and Slack, absent six years ago, continue to grow alongside long-standing collaboration suites like Office 365 and G Suite, illustrating that workers now favour flexibility and functionality across the board.