HubSpot: Making Marketing Easy with Okta

Marketers want to showcase their product in the most attractive way possible -- and with innumerable ways to reach the consumer, that can be difficult. HubSpot, an integrated online marketing platform, understands the importance of time and personalization to hit important metrics and create awareness, and aims to help its customers make marketing that people actually love.

To do so, HubSpot went looking for a partner that would enable their employees to more easily and efficiently get access to the tools they need to be productive. We recently sat down with Jim O’Neill, HubSpot’s chief information officer, to find out how HubSpot uses Okta to make marketing easy.

What challenges did you face with your last identity management service?

Before Okta, HubSpot used Active Directory as our core identity tool. It was very limited based on how many SaaS-based applications actually had native support for Active Directory. This ended in bifurcation between what IT could manage centrally as well as what we would have to provision in every one of these 70+ SaaS-based applications.

So, how did you land on Okta?

Compared to the two to three other prominent cloud-based identity access management tools we looked at, Okta was further along in its vision. It was also in line with HubSpot’s vision for pure cloud play. Other options felt like legacy systems that had basically been pushed to the cloud, versus a really well-architected product designed to operate in the cloud.

What are the benefits for your end users?

With the single-sign on dashboard, our users simply go to their branded domain in the morning, which brings up the list of applications that they have access to and they start their day there. They get access to everything they need within the HubSpot portfolio, day one, and minute one.

And internally, how does the IT department benefit?

We’re a hyper growth startup today -- we add between 30 and 50 employees every single month. The combinations and permutations are massive, too, with 70 different applications. So something that would’ve taken a classic IT organization hours if not days, takes us minutes. For every application, we can say which users have which privileges. It greatly reduces our onboarding time.

Another key feature is records management, meaning who’s using what application and how often. Now, I have some information on exactly how much usage is going on in these third party applications and who has adopted.