Okta helps Informatica deliver on a powerful ecommerce vision

Lisa Moorhead:  When we look at what our E-commerce strategy is as a whole, the Informatica Marketplace is very much the linchpin of that. It brings together all different products from across our entire Informatica platform. What the Marketplace does is allows us to offer add-ons to our Cloud product that are available for some. They could just come and purchase. We have sometargets that we set at launch. Happily grew 500% in the first year. It was tremendously successful. We looked at the infrastructure underlying that and said, "We really need to make sure that this is more scalable in the future." We looked at changing ourE-commerce platform to Digital River, which was part of this project as well, and also bringing on single sign-on with Okta.

Now what happens is somebody can go on to the Marketplace, they can purchase a block. They can purchase one of our Cloud solutions, check out through Digital River, seamlessly sign in with Okta. Their purchase, whatever they have purchased, is automatically provisioned in our Cloud system and they have instant access, all with Okta connecting everything.

We've been Okta customers for quite some time for our internal single sign-on. We've deployed Okta for access to our sale systems, finance systems, and so forth, internally, and been very successful; had great adoption there. When it went to looking at the external used case, Okta was naturally one of the first things that we looked at, whether or not we would be able to deploy it, and we were successful in doing that.

One of the business requirements that we had when we embarked on our E-commerce initiative was making it seamlessfor the end user; making it look like Informatica. What we leveraged Okta for, we actually use the APIs in order to handle all the user management; things like registrations, forgot passwords, that sort of thing. Leveraging the APIs to do that behind the scenes and still let the user feel like they were still in an Informatica property.

We're just in the beginning stages of our E-commerce journey, I would say. Ultimately, the end goal is that a customer can come to Informatica. They can purchase our software, be automatically provisioned, get training, get support, purchase add-on, value-add solutions to the Informatica Marketplace all with one log-in. That's all Okta behind the scenes.

One of the reasons that we selected Okta was because we were deliberately looking for something that was a Cloud offering. I mentioned Cloud is very key to our IT strategy. There's a reason for that. That's by design. We want to make sure that our valuable resources, our people on our teams have the opportunity to work on projects that deliver business value, help our business users innovate, help them break in to new markets, and not spend time managing servers and infrastructure and all that stuff. By using a service like Okta, we can free up our business analyst, our technical people to be innovative and creative and work with our business, as opposed to managing technology.