[June 19, 2013] Okta Adds Customer and Partner Identity Management Functionality Tweet Jun 19, 2013 (Close-Up Media via COMTEX) -- Okta has announced new service functionality to address the challenges enterprises face in managing the identities of their partners and customers and providing them with secure access to business critical services. "More than ever, businesses are creating deeper connections with their partners and customers online," said Eric Berg, vice president of products, Okta. "Traditionally, these customer or partner portals have required significant custom development or have forced users to do the integration by managing multiple usernames and passwords across a disparate set of applications. We're addressing these issues head-on by enabling customers to rapidly deliver Okta-powered customer and partner portals with a robust set of APIs, rich new customization options and built-in support for seamless B2B federation." Building on its success in helping enterprises such as Clorox, Gatwick Airport, Encore Capital and Workday with their internal identity management challenges, Okta said its new capabilities are helping enterprises like Allergan, Purolator, Rotary International and ServiceSource deliver seamless access to member communities, partners or even customers of their own new online products. Okta is enabling enterprises of all sizes to increase in the adoption and usage of their externally facing portals, resulting in increased top line revenue and enhance customer and partner satisfaction. As part of its service, the Company noted that it has introduced a number of new features to support external identity management scenarios, including: -Set of Restful APIs: Okta's APIs span account creation, automated provisioning, access control and session management -- each of which are critical in enabling customers to integrate Okta's identity service into any kind of external-facing portal -Rich, In-Product Customization Options: For companies that want to deliver a branded user experience without investing significant development resources, Okta offers customization options to make delivery of an Okta-powered customer or partner portal a simple configuration exercise. -Seamless Federated Access Into B2B Portals: Okta enables enterprises to offer partners seamless federated access to B2B portals from existing on-premises directories or identity management systems. With a few clicks, customers can provide single sign-on, as well as provisioning and deprovisioning capabilities, to external portals as they do internally. "This is a significant step forward in achieving our vision for a vendor-neutral Enterprise Identity Network that securely connects any combination of applications, devices and users," said Todd McKinnon, CEO, Okta. "As an open platform that's inherently based in the cloud, Okta is uniquely positioned to let companies use the applications they want without sacrificing the end-user experience. While our heritage has been in addressing this challenge for internal users, it's very exciting to now see how a number of our customers are starting to extend our platform to do the same thing for their external users. We see this as a huge opportunity and an area that we're very well-poised to lead for our customers." One customer leveraging Okta's new external identity management functionality is ServiceSource, a company focusing on recurring revenue management -- which has deployed Okta as the identity layer for its new Renew OnDemand SaaS application. Okta reported that ServiceSource Renew OnDemand is an application designed specifically to arm sales teams, executives and channel partners with a complete system to renew, upsell and cross-sell customer service contracts and subscriptions. "When we started building Renew OnDemand, we wanted to work with best-in-class companies like Okta, BigMachines, MuleSoft, Pactera, salesforce.com and Xactly to ensure that Renew would easily fit into existing corporate infrastructures," said Amrith Nambiar, vice president of business applications, ServiceSource. "Okta gives Renew OnDemand users a transparent, single point of entry regardless of the existing identity infrastructures that our customers have in place." As an Okta customer for internal identity management, ServiceSource was already familiar with Okta's zero-downtime cloud architecture, which would prove core to the deployment of Renew OnDemand. The Company added that it also helps Renew OnDemand meet corporate security requirements and work within the existing environments of ServiceSource customers. "Our customers range from medium-sized, rapidly growing businesses to some of the world's largest Fortune 500 companies. The reality is that no two customers have the same environment, so we really needed a platform that could work with anything," added Nambiar. "Not only does Okta easily integrate to existing infrastructure like Active Directory and LDAP, but it also works with any 3rd party identity solutions that our customers might have in place." Okta is an enterprise-grade identity management service, built from the ground up in the cloud and designed to address the challenges of a cloud, mobile and interconnected business world. 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