Building Our European Presence in a Key Tech Nation: Our New Paris Office
To celebrate our Paris office opening and continued expansion into Europe, we hosted an event with some of our local customers and partners from Engie, nonprofit organisation BECOMTECH, Workplace by Facebook, Box, Dunkerque LNG SAS and VMware. Together, we discussed identity, how France became a premiere tech nation, how companies are using technology to innovate their businesses and the importance of social impact.
In an action-packed day, the highlights were:
Launching Okta for Good in France
At Okta, we strive to make our world more diverse and inclusive. Building pathways into tech for high potential talent from our local communities around the world is one of the best ways we can make an impact as a company.
And so it was fitting that this event was also the launch of Okta for Good in France. I’m proud to say that co-founder and COO, Frederic Kerrest presented a €10,000 grant to BECOMTECH, which introduces junior and high school girls to digital and computer science - #becausegirlscan.
Learnings from the Engie experience
Frederic also discussed innovation with Yves Le Gélard, Engie’s executive vice president and chief digital officer. Yves has great credibility in this field as Engie is taking a lead in energy transition. It is developing solutions that use digital technology to drive disruption and create a value proposition to enable greater cooperation, both within and outside this global organisation.
He also highlighted that Engie overhauled its IT infrastructure by implementing a cloud-first policy. Now any architecture not relying on the cloud has to be justified. That is contributing to the company being able to scale to better handle over 150,000 employees in 70 countries.
Digital transformation panel
We were joined by French executives from our customer Dunkerque LNG SAS, as well as strategic partners, Box, VMware and Workplace by Facebook to discuss what digital transformation really means to businesses. The conversation centred on how innovation and security go hand in hand when it comes to perfect customer experience, but the panel also looked ahead to the future.
All panellists agreed that AI and ML will up-end traditional business in France and around the globe. This presents a big challenge, but the promise of new products will make companies smarter and enable employees to focus on what they are good at.
Now that the event is over, we’d like to thank all our customers and partners for their contributions -- you made this launch a success. The Okta journey in France has just started and we’re very much looking forward to growing and helping to take your organisations to the next level.
