Vivint Solar

Mark Trout: Vivint Solar is a relatively young company, in that we started in 2011. We're one of the top three residential solar integrators in the country. We do all of our own installations for our customers, as well as service and maintenance over the course of their ownership of the product.

Mark Trout: The growth of the company has been pretty rapid over the past six years. When you look around the country, you can see an absolute abundance of opportunity for solar energy development, solar energy management throughout the US. So with our industry continually changing, we're always reevaluating what technologies we need to have, both internal IT technologies as well as for our customers and the products we sell.

Mark Trout: Right now we're seeing massive increase in the amount of technology that is going out to the customers. The customers are demanding more, expecting more. That, of course, means that we're developing more tools for customers.

Mark Trout: One of our key strategies in the technology space is to be 100% in the cloud. It really is something that that allows us the speed to develop, release, and roll out to our employees across the country very, very rapidly.

Mark Trout: Identity management is critical for us in all aspects. Probably 80% of our employees actually don't even have a laptop. They're 100% on either tablet or mobile phone. And so making sure that they have the right profile, making sure they have the right access to the tools that they need is critical for us.

Mark Trout: When we selected Okta, we came off of ADFS and moved over to Universal Directory. We actually transitioned off of not only ADFS, but off of the office applications at the same time. Okta is not tied to any other application in specific, and so as we look at our application environment, we're able to tie Okta into pretty much everything that we have.

Mark Trout: Our Okta system is integrated with our workday system. The integration has really reduced the manual effort. It's allowed us to automate. So as we continue to strive to lower the costs of our operation and lower costs of our business, Okta has enabled us to do that, because every manual process we either eliminate or automate is coming through software.

Mark Trout: Okta is our foundation for our identity management. We use it not only for customers in accessing their data, but also with our partners to transfer data between the partner companies, so that we have consolidated view of the data from the different technologies.

Mark Trout: Recently, with Okta's acquisition of Stormpath, we've shifted all of our B-to-C models over to Okta as well.

Mark Trout: At Vivint Solar, we're really excited to be in the renewable space. It's awesome to be able to bring renewable energy to directly to the customers, where they can actually also save money and have control of their energy decisions going forward.