Josh Greene: Inside Okta’s Billion-Dollar Cloud Partnership

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[00:00:00] Josh Greene: Sales leadership when they see, oh, we see a higher conversion rate when we're co-selling with AWS, they might not wanna know all of the reasons why exactly that is. But if I'm seeing a higher rate of pipeline progression, a higher close rate, or larger deals, or a higher retention rate of existing customers when we're working with them, that really is quite convincing evidence.

[00:00:25] Chip Rodgers: Hey everyone, Chip Rodgers with Inside Partnering and we're back again at, we're here at Okta headquarters and in San Francisco. Just really excited to be here. Beautiful space here, Josh.

[00:00:37] Josh Greene: Yeah, it's a great spot. Thanks for coming by. It's great to see you again. Yeah.

[00:00:41] Chip Rodgers: Yeah. So I'm so excited to be joined by Josh Greene.

[00:00:44] Chip Rodgers: Josh is area Vice President of Cloud Alliances for Okta. Relatively new in the role about six, nine months. Eight months now. Eight months, yeah. And long time, five years with AWS and big name at AWS, Josh [00:01:00] Greene is well known.

[00:01:01] Josh Greene: Yeah, I wish. Yeah. But. We had a good run there. It was a really fun time.

[00:01:05] Josh Greene: I enjoyed a WSA lot. Yeah.

[00:01:07] Chip Rodgers: Prior to that OneLogin, SHI, a number of years at SoftChoice. Yeah. So always in partnerships and sales kinds of roles working with customers and those kinds of things. First of all, welcome Josh.

[00:01:20] Josh Greene: It's great to be here.

[00:01:21] Josh Greene: And the, it's interesting, all those companies, it really feels like it led me back to this opportunity at Okta, working with channels, working with AWS, working with marketplaces, working in identity with OneLogin. And here I am at Okta. Yeah.

[00:01:33] Chip Rodgers: Identity security. It's a hot topic these days.

[00:01:36] Josh Greene: Sure is.

[00:01:36] Josh Greene: Yeah. It's an exciting time to be here. Yeah.

[00:01:39] Chip Rodgers: So Josh let's start just to talk a little bit about what your role is at Okta and what you and your team are up to.

[00:01:45] Josh Greene: Sure. So I have Global Cloud Alliances. I'm, I've been very focused on AWS since starting. For obvious reasons given that I just came from there.

[00:01:54] Josh Greene: We have a global team that supports co-sell and we also work really [00:02:00] closely with our teams that support coil and co-market. We loosely are broken down that way organizationally, but a big priority is how do we derive the most amount of value for Okta and our customers from leveraging the partnership with AWS.

[00:02:14] Josh Greene: And it comes in a variety of ways. About, integrations that the team has built, the, that's adjacent to us as well as things like co-sell and leveraging marketplace, as well as things like strategic collaboration agreements and investments and funding. So it's there's always something new.

[00:02:31] Chip Rodgers: So many things and and, five years at a AWS, you were deeply into a number of things working, aligned very closely to marketplace and working with customers on, on, building out their marketplace. Presence and those kinds of things. You got a lot you've probably forgotten more than many people know about how to do that.

[00:02:51] Chip Rodgers: Really exciting for for you to be in this role with Okta.

[00:02:54] Josh Greene: What's interesting about it is all the things that we talked about doing and we, the best practices that we were [00:03:00] developing and, those were based on what we learned from working with partners in some cases like Okta. So that was one of the, one of the people on my team was working with Okta early on.

[00:03:08] Josh Greene: So seeing the evolution, but now being a little bit more on the operator side. What resonates and what doesn't resonate. And thankfully there's been enough experience with seeing what has worked and what's not worked so that I can come with a fresh perspective about how we can go try to implement the change that we need to change to help us, grow faster.

[00:03:29] Josh Greene: So I think it's been really fun to see, here's what we talked about doing versus here's what we're actually doing and. Encountering some of the same, obstacles and opportunities to drive organizational alignment to go execute on those things. But it's been a nice, it's been a nice change.

[00:03:43] Josh Greene: Refreshing. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:03:45] Chip Rodgers: That's, that is exciting. I think it, it is interesting coming, from AWS where you're working with a lot of ISVs bringing them along and helping them and learning from them along the way as well. And now at Okta. Running things. So [00:04:00] how has that transition been?

[00:04:01] Chip Rodgers: How are you, it sounds like it's going well, but

[00:04:04] Josh Greene: I'm enjoying it and I see progress and we, it's interesting. We have a very mature marketplace business, for example. I think some of the other elements of our partnership frankly have some catching up to do, and we're working on that.

[00:04:18] Josh Greene: Whereas some organizations and some partnerships start with success in one area or another. We happen to have some very great success because of a foundation that was built from the people before me, both on the AWS side and on the Octa side. So we have this foundation, but there's a lot of work to do.

[00:04:35] Josh Greene: And I'd have a much deeper appreciation for the El other elements beyond the marketplace and the co-sell side that really go into making a partnership like this be successful. But I really feel like there's a tremendous amount of energy and momentum and desire to make things work even better than they are today.

[00:04:53] Josh Greene: And that's fun. Yeah.

[00:04:55] Chip Rodgers: And congrats to Okta for joining the $1 billion Club [00:05:00] Marketplace transactions through.

[00:05:02] Josh Greene: Yeah. Yeah. That I, that was a, I had nothing to do with that one. That was all the team from before. But what an awesome milestone. And I think it's one of those milestones where I feel like we need to implement areas where we're, there's something that we're striving towards that will demonstrate some element of maturity or success.

[00:05:21] Josh Greene: You need to have these wins along the way. Because they reinvigorate everyone. There's a common goal. So our team was working really hard with. With AWS to go accomplish, that goal and to have that, it was a nice headline. And I think we're gonna continue to grow and grow moving forward.

[00:05:38] Josh Greene: I think we're also, we'll see continued marketplace growth, but also unlocking other parts of value from the partnership that will kind. Hopefully catch up from a maturity perspective with some of the marketplace results that we have. That's what I'm really focused on. Yeah.

[00:05:53] Chip Rodgers: Yeah. That's amazing.

[00:05:54] Chip Rodgers: That's terrific. In your role and with your team, you're, clearly working, [00:06:00] closely with AWS and co-sell is so critical and with cloud providers and the benefits that come along with that, with, being able to access, pre-commit and those kinds of things.

[00:06:12] Chip Rodgers: Talk a little bit about the co-sell motion at Okta and how that's working and how you're, helping to bring the teams together to be able to do that and drive value for customers.

[00:06:22] Josh Greene: Yeah, I think we're at a really interesting time because the things that we've done that get us, that got us here.

[00:06:30] Josh Greene: Can help us continue to grow. And some of that growth would be linear. And we're also trying to experiment with things that could create more exponential growth or non-linear growth. So I think this age old, particularly right now in the age of ai, this notion of, throw bodies that are at the problem is just not part of the solution that's tenable for anyone really.

[00:06:50] Josh Greene: How do we, how are we using data better and via co-sell. We do have a treasure trove of information that we can leverage when we [00:07:00] share opportunities with AWS that give us some insights on things like yeah, if they're marketplace inclined, which gives us some measurement understanding of, what's the level of relationship that AWS might have with a customer. And that's really valuable for us.

[00:07:13] Josh Greene: But the development of use cases and our better together story is , something that someone on my team really called out at the end of last year and said. We're not as developed as we could be. And we spent the first quarter refining those better together stories so that we had, let's start with two on each side, two for Okta, two for Auth0.

[00:07:31] Josh Greene: And let's make sure that everyone's comfortable with understanding how do we work with Bedrock? What is our Amazon Q story, for example? And we needed that foundation. And now we're starting to turn our attention a little bit more towards. What comes next? And I think, we've talked about this, but industry is one area where I think more refinement of those better together stories and those use cases is really gonna pay off.

[00:07:55] Chip Rodgers: It's when the rubber really hits the road. And those, because then you're getting very specific about the [00:08:00] industry and they're very different, right. Industry to industry.

[00:08:02] Josh Greene: Yeah. I think. It the customers expect it. AWS, so AWS has realigned their sales organization that way. Customers want specificity and unique things that help solve their specific problems.

[00:08:14] Josh Greene: And we do some of that. Part of that is what we need to, it's how we package it up and present it to them. And for us. You asked about different priorities. I think, the enablement of internal teams and internal alignment. Is maybe one of the things that's, that I have seen as an opportunity.

[00:08:31] Josh Greene: Whereas if we're not aligned, internally about how we want to pursue these opportunities then whatever message that we tell to AWS or to customers, I feel like we'll be watered down a bit. So we made a tremendous amount of headway just getting alignment cross-functionally, like with Ron, who you just spoke with to make sure that we're really pursuing.

[00:08:50] Josh Greene: Industry specific use cases that we think will resonate with customers and that we all are circling around and agreeing on what we're gonna go execute. Yeah,

[00:08:57] Chip Rodgers: That's great. That's great. And so [00:09:00] that the, that message, the, that better together story will be really impactful when it when it gets to AWS and to the customer?

[00:09:07] Josh Greene: The beauty is that you can measure it. That, the beauty is that we can see how our campaigns are performing. We can see what kind of conversion rates, we can see higher, renewal rates, et cetera. So it's, someone has an idea and we see this as could work, but now we can test two different ideas and which one's gonna resonate more.

[00:09:26] Josh Greene: And it really creates buy-in from the sales organization here. Sales leadership when they see, oh, we see a higher conversion rate when we're co-selling with AWS, they might not wanna know all of the reasons why exactly that is. But if I'm seeing a higher rate of pipeline progression, a higher close rate, or larger deals, or a higher retention rate of existing customers when we're working with them, that really is quite convincing evidence.

[00:09:54] Chip Rodgers: That's amazing. That's awesome. Josh. Maybe one other topic we could chat about a little bit. [00:10:00] And, shame on me for not talking about a ai. I think we all have to talk about AI today. Okta is very tightly connected to, AWS on this front with bedrock and q and a number of of AWS technologies.

[00:10:12] Chip Rodgers: Talk a little bit about. About that and how that resonates.

[00:10:16] Josh Greene: Sure. I'd say, I'm gonna paraphrase our CEO, but there's been a couple waves that have come that Okta has been able to catch and ride. Certainly the growth of cloud and the proliferation of SaaS applications. And then the whole, COVID created this mobile workforce was another one.

[00:10:35] Josh Greene: I, aI and Ag Agentic AI and agents is certainly another one where the use cases are wide and here we are, what, maybe two years into this cycle of seeing from hype to more impactful use cases that are resonating. But the growth of agent AI agents is something that all companies, it feels like are confronting and that [00:11:00] creates really the next.

[00:11:01] Josh Greene: Wave of potential for Okta and AU zero to grow so that AWS is a partner in that that we can accelerate integrations that we do with them and other work that we do, outside of a WSI think is a really exciting time that's generating quite a bit of pipeline for us and it's seeding some new use cases and wins that are.

[00:11:24] Josh Greene: That are awesome, honestly. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:11:26] Chip Rodgers: Terrific. Josh, thank you for taking some time and and Congrat, I know it's eight, you're eight months in, but congrats on the new role and it's very exciting and really appreciate you taking some time and sharing your. Insights into AWS and and Okta.

[00:11:40] Josh Greene: Thank you very much. I always good to see you. I appreciate you stopping by and yeah, it's been an exciting time. Yeah,

[00:11:45] Chip Rodgers: fantastic. So thank you all as well for joining another episode of Inside Partnering and we'll see you next time. Thanks everybody.

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