Credit: Okta
Identity management vendor Okta is ramping up its local go-to-market efforts, striking a new distribution deal with Nextgen Distribution in Australia and New Zealand.
The new partnership, which is set to be formally launched at Nextgen’s annual Summer Party on 13 February, is aimed at providing Okta’s Australia-and New Zealand-based users with best-in-class technology and support through local security channel partners.
It is anticipated that Nextgen will enable the company to broaden its reach in A/NZ and help to facilitate greater access to leading security partners, resources, recruitment, onboarding and training support.
The companies claim that the deal, which marks an expansion of the vendor’s increasingly partner-focused go-to-market strategy locally, sees Nextgen become its first value-added distributor in the A/NZ region.
“Okta’s introduction of distribution [with Nextgen Distribution] is its first in A/NZ and follows the successful partnership with distribution organisations in other regions…over the last 18-24 months,” Okta’s APAC regional alliances director Matt Paull told ARN.
“Nextgen Distribution will play an important role in Okta’s growth as it scales its partner ecosystem across A/NZ, and works towards its mission of enabling any organisation to securely use any technology.
“Nextgen will drive key initiatives including; partner recruitment, onboarding, enablement and presales,” Paull added.
The move marks a shift in Okta’s strategy to penetrate the local market, with a deeper focus on partners.
“Okta has always been invested in the channel, however over the past few years, we’ve recognised that in order to scale and reach our global growth targets, we need to take a more partner-centric GTM [go-to-market] approach,” Paull said.
The vendor’s current go-to-market partners in the region include Deloitte, The Missing Link, Telstra, Solista and NTT, among others.
According to Graham Sowden, Okta’s APAC general manager, a key element in realising its new partner-focused strategy in the local region was signing a local distributor.
“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,” Sowden said.
Nextgen Group CEO John Walters said the distributor is excited to support Okta in its global expansion efforts.
The new deal comes just days after Nextgen revealed it had become the latest distributor in Australia to sign a distribution deal with mobile cyber security and phishing protection vendor Lookout.
Roughly two years prior, in early 2018, the vendor inked an A/NZ distribution deal with Ingram Micro. At the time, that deal was touted as a “logical extension” of the companies’ existing partnership in the United Sates.
