Partnering with Jive: Enabling Customer Productivity and True Collaboration

We’re a company centered around customer success. Plain and simple. If you’ve spent even a few minutes browsing our website or blog, you probably already know that. But what you might not see immediately is that our idea of customer success extends beyond the enterprises who have subscriptions for Okta -- it also touches our partners’ customers as well.

That’s why Jive, one of our first customers, partnered with us to enable true, dynamic collaboration inside and outside of enterprise organizations. Together we’ve seen how internal and external communities are moving away from the "old stack" (you know, email-based, linear interactions) to easy and intuitive exchanges in communities like ours.

Our partnership with Jive has been a mutually beneficial one -- they’ve helped us build an awesome community, and we’ve helped them increase their customers’ productivity by 15% on average with a seamless, secure solution. So we recently sat down with Jive’s chief strategy officer, Christopher Morace, to talk identity, choosing Okta and how we make one heck of a team.

When did you realize your customers needed a way to address identity management issues?

We had a huge challenge around solving access and identity problems -- any friction would cause people to get frustrated with the solutions they were trying to use. We learned about these issues when implementing new services and saw our customers manually bring identity management and Jive together. Slowly, we started seeing different customers use Okta as their solution of choice. We got more educated on what people were doing, and realized [Okta] solved an awful lot of problems for us.

So, why Okta specifically? Why not another provider?

In general, we believe we’re entering a new phase of innovation -- people are going to replace their old systems, and it's going to be a ‘best-of-breed’ choice. We picked Box because we thought they were the best content solution for the enterprise. We picked Okta because they’re the clear leader in the identity management space.

How do Jive and Okta work together?

One of the things we are doing with Okta is actually embedding it in the Jive platform, so you get Okta functionality out of the box with Jive. We want to make it known to our customers that we’ll provide them with a seamless solution. It’s pretty rare that anyone will implement something like Jive and not need something like Okta. We want to make it as easy as possible for our customers.

What’s the benefit for Jive to partner with Okta?

Okta is the thing that connects people to their applications, and that's compelling to any company. You can actually replace old stuff and move to the future, as opposed to layering new things on.

We're trying to enable these large enterprises to move to the future. They're not going to throw everything out immediately, and so you have to bridge across the firewall. I think the combination is really powerful together -- and I don't know that any of our customers in the future will ever buy Jive without Okta bundled into it.

To hear the rest of Christopher’s interview, check out Jive’s partner testimonial video on our website.