Okta crowns Todd Parsons as A/NZ alliances director

Todd Parsons (Okta)

Enterprise identity and access management vendor, Okta has hired Todd Parsons as its new A/NZ channel and alliances director.

In this newly created role, Parsons will be based in Sydney and will report to Okta Asia Pacific head of partners and alliances, Chee Keong Law.

Parsons comes to Okta with more than 25 years experience in the IT industry across A/NZ and APJ. He previously held leadership roles at Oracle, NetApp, Avaya, Micro Focus and most recently at Cohesity.

“Todd is also an experienced direct sales and marketing leader, which gives him a holistic perspective when it comes to understanding customers and partner needs,” Okta Asia Pacific general manager Graham Sowden said. 

 “As A/NZ businesses continue to embrace dynamic new ways of working, securing identity and access is now more important than ever.

“Identity platforms have become central to enterprise technology strategies, and we’re looking forward to helping our partners in the region, who specialise in IAM and cybersecurity, to support customers in this rapid digital transformation.” 

Parsons pointed out there was an immediate opportunity to build mutually beneficial partnerships that provide real customer outcomes.

 “I look forward to working with and growing the local team,” Parsons said. 

Alongside Parsons, Okta has also padded out its A/NZ channel team hiring Liam Leaney and Shane Charleston as regional alliance managers. 

Leaney’s career spans more than 20 years in senior channel and enterprise sales roles at companies such as Microsoft, VMware, Rocket Software, Commvault and Ingram Micro. 

Leaney is based in Sydney and will work directly with local partners as well as Okta’s distributor, Nextgen. 

Melbourne-based Charleston has more than 25 years’ experience in IT, telecommunications and logistics, having started at Westcon to build the business with Telstra in the Australian market. His most recent role at Tech Data saw him lead a high performing team supporting the IBM business. 

Charleston will be responsible for a set of national partners and global systems integrators.