With cyberattacks on the rise globally and India facing over 3,000 attacks weekly, identity management and robust security solutions are more critical than ever. Ajay Advani, VP-Channel at Okta, sees immense opportunity in the region’s evolving cybersecurity landscape. In an exclusive interview, he delves into Okta’s partner-first strategy, their commitment to India’s growing market, and how they plan to empower partners to navigate the complexities of today’s security challenges while delivering value to customers.
What are the key opportunities for Okta’s partner ecosystem in India, and how do these align with your long-term commitment to the region?
The starting point is the cybersecurity landscape in India and globally, where cyberattacks are steadily increasing, and India is no exception. Indian businesses face over 3,000 cyberattacks per week, second only to companies in Taiwan, highlighting the urgent need for robust security solutions.
Our commitment to India is strong. We’ve established a local entity and hired hundreds of new employees. This commitment is two-fold: first, for R&D—not just for testing, but for building world-class products. Secondly, we are committed to India as a key market. With India’s rise as the fifth-largest economy, soon to be the third, the opportunities are immense.
We have adopted a partner-first approach, meaning all business in India will be conducted with and through partners. Okta is customer-focused, and partners with deep customer connections and strong identity and cybersecurity practices—big or small—have significant opportunities with us. Additionally, we work closely with our distributor, Savex, to identify and enable a broad network of partners
In FY26, how do you envision Okta’s partners and alliances contributing to driving customer engagement and accelerating growth? Can you share specific strategies that will empower your partners?
As a partner-first organisation, all business will be conducted through partners. But why take this approach? First, partners provide the reach and scale needed in a large market like India. Second, they offer a whole-of-product approach. While Okta specialises in identity solutions, customers also require endpoint security, network security, and more. Partners are well-positioned to deliver these comprehensive, turnkey solutions. Lastly, customer advocacy is crucial. Many partners have deep, long-standing relationships with their customers, adding credibility when they advocate for us. By collaborating with partners to deliver scale, complete solutions and strong advocacy, we create value for customers, partners, and Okta.
How are evolving cybersecurity threats, rising consumer expectations, and increasing IT spending influencing Okta’s business model and the role of your channel partners?
Customers today prioritise three key goals: enhancing security, optimising costs, and driving revenue growth. Okta addresses these needs with a unified identity protection platform, offering more than just point solutions. The Workforce Identity Cloud manages access, governance, and privileged access for employees, contractors, and partners, while the Customer Identity Cloud ensures secure and seamless experiences for end users.
By leveraging a single platform like Okta, customers can optimise their spending and negotiate better deals through deeper engagement. A seamless user experience also helps boost revenue by reducing transaction drop-offs.
Partners play a vital role by offering advisory services that strengthen security with the right access and governance policies. They also help reduce service costs through local support and competitive pricing, while enabling customers to deliver a smooth experience to their users, which in turn drives revenue growth.
AI is transforming business processes across industries. How is Okta leveraging AI to enhance its solutions, and how do you plan to integrate these advancements into your partner ecosystem?
AI is undeniably revolutionising the world, but it’s important to recognise that it’s not just used by companies like us to help customers—it’s also being exploited by bad actors. For example, AI powers sophisticated phishing attacks and deep fakes used to steal data. However, on our side, we extensively leverage AI across both our workforce and customer identity products. As the largest independent identity provider in the world, we handle billions of logins daily. This gives us access to vast amounts of data, allowing us to train AI and machine learning models to improve our products. One area we’re applying AI is enhancing user experience (UI/UX). We aim to give customers a faster, more secure experience. Further, we leverage AI to boost productivity. For example, we can now use auto-generated code to increase efficiency in app development.
But AI’s most crucial role is in security. With evolving threats, we’ve introduced AI-centric products like Identity Security Posture Management, which identifies security gaps before an attack occurs. Another solution, Identity Threat Protection, continuously scans environments for suspicious activity and suggests remedial actions. Lastly, we’ve developed a unique tool called the Universal Logout, which, in the event of an attack, can log all users out of their apps to help organisations regain control of their IT environment and contain the impact of the breach.
Can you elaborate on Okta’s investment strategy in building a robust partner ecosystem, and how are you ensuring that partners are supported across various aspects of your business?
Partners are a business, and our model needs to ensure that they can make money and grow with us. To support this, we have a partner program designed to be profitable for partners, allowing them to reinvest in training, systems, and customer engagement. We categorise our partners into two tiers. First, our top-tier “Focus” partners are those with the most potential and the strongest customer bases. We work with them directly. Other partners are managed through Savex, our distributor, because we recognise that we can’t manage everything ourselves. This division of effort allows us to focus on enabling both tiers effectively.
Capability building is a big part of our investment. All of our SEs (Solution Engineers) are responsible not just for engaging with customers, but also for partner enablement. They work with partners to improve their skills so they can better meet customer needs. We treat Savex as if it were a Focus partner, enabling them to train other partners.
We also emphasise predictability and confidence for partners by ensuring that all business in India is carried out through them, with no direct sales. This helps them confidently invest in their Okta practices, knowing there’s no conflict of interest. Our internal teams are also trained to understand why this approach is necessary, even though it might mean less revenue on a transaction due to partner discounts. Our marketing efforts are heavily co-invested with partners, and we have a unique executive sponsorship model for our top partners. These sponsors advocate for partners within Okta. This is not about day-to-day operations, but about truly listening to partners so that we can better shape our future strategy.
Finally, Okta operates in an ecosystem. We integrate with nearly 7,000 applications out of the box, working with existing technology investments rather than replacing them. Our technology alliances with companies like Zscaler, Crowdstrike, and Palo Alto allow us to offer customers comprehensive solutions to help customers. Through these alliances, we’re able to read signals from different systems to assess risk levels and help customers improve their security.
What is your go-to-market strategy in India?
We maintain a lean sales and pre-sales team, and our go-to-market approach is segmented. We focus on two main segments: enterprise and commercial/emerging businesses. Each has unique needs; for instance, enterprise clients often require more customised solutions compared to smaller companies. Currently, we are based only in Bangalore.
Our approach is entirely partner-first, which helps keep our costs low. This is particularly important in India, a price-sensitive market. Another key aspect of our strategy is ensuring customer success. We have a customer-first mindset, ensuring that customers adopt and benefit from the use of our technology. In the SaaS and cloud world, customers can switch providers easily, so we must delight them everyday. Our high global renewal rates reflect this approach.
Any concluding remarks for your customers?
In India, there’s significant corporate activity with mergers and acquisitions, and one of the biggest challenges in such situations is managing different technology platforms. Okta is uniquely positioned to address identity management during mergers. We can efficiently unify various identity solutions across group companies, providing parent companies with a comprehensive view of access and control while allowing individual companies to maintain their own data and identity controls. This capability is something that Okta excels at, making us the go-to solution for companies navigating mergers and acquisitions where identity management is a critical concern.
We are at the beginning of our journey, and our focus is on ensuring that those who invest in us see real benefits. At Okta, we firmly believe that the key to success is making sure both our customers and partners thrive. By taking care of them, they, in turn, take care of us. This customer and partner-centric focus is something I truly value at Okta.
