“We wanted to help more organisations succeed.” Leon Oud shares the vision behind FuseLogic, Okta’s most certified partner in the Benelux

IT leaders know that the best and most up-to-date technologies can make a sizeable impact on their business results. But being on the cutting edge brings its own challenges: from creating and changing users in a wide array of applications, to ensuring the security of apps they may not have full control over – particularly when, confronted with outdated processes for coordinating applications with HR. The good news? All these challenges can be addressed through identity lifecycle automation.

Enter FuseLogic, a Dutch solution provider with expertise in Identity Lifecycle who helps organisations to automate their Identity and Access Management (IAM) and Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) initiatives. We spoke with Co-founder and Sales and General Manager, Leon Oud, to learn about the vision behind the company and how it went from focusing on reselling and implementing one legacy database management system for 10 years, to becoming award-winning Okta experts in just two.

I took a leap of faith in 2007, when I founded FuseLogic alongside two co-founders. Initially, the company focused on middleware. That’s where the name ‘FuseLogic’ comes from. Our purpose was in helping organisations to ‘fuse’ all their tools and systems together with the necessary middleware to make use as simple as possible. But back then, things in the IAM world were far from simple. Most large organisations in the Netherlands were using a legacy database management system that was complex to implement and use, costly, and very time consuming. Our job for the best part of 10 years was to help them keep this system up and running and try to simplify their processes. 

But for FuseLogic, success means enabling any organisation to automate processes with tools that work well and are easy to use. Unfortunately, back then, it didn’t seem like there were many options for smaller companies with smaller budgets to streamline their identity lifecycles. It was in 2017 that we started actively searching for a tool that could enable us to help these organisations succeed. We spent months gathering marketing information, having conversations with vendors, watching demos, and going to training sessions to test a variety of alternatives. The search finally came to an end when we found Okta.

Okta immediately stood out because it makes identity lifecycle automation easy—no matter the customer’s size, business processes, or technology set up. As soon as we understood that, we became Okta partners and started training our people to the highest possible level. Today, we’re proud to hold 30 certifications, the highest number among partners in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. In addition, nine out of ten FuseLogic employees are Okta certified - that’s everyone except the office manager at reception.

Additionally, we use Single Sign-On and Multi-Factor Authentication internally, which means that we talk to customers not only as experts, but with first-hand experience of what it’s like to use Okta ourselves, every day.

We believe that organisational culture is just as important in determining the success of an implementation project as the technology itself. So our starting point for helping customers is always their daily realities. With Okta, it’s quick and easy to deploy the technology, so we have more time to spend on helping customers make the most of Okta to support their daily practices. This way, they can actually experience the results of the project first-hand, quickly, which makes it easier for them to get team members on board and carry on the initiative with enthusiasm.

It’s very gratifying to see our knowledge being translated into real-world benefits for our customers, and to see their success as well as ours being celebrated. It was an amazing feeling to win Okta’s Northern Europe Partner of the Year Award for 2019-2020. But we take even more pride in helping our customers make the most of Okta, no matter what tools they choose to use.

To that end, we’ve been making connectors to enable customers and prospects to integrate Okta with applications that aren’t yet part of the Okta Integration Network. The Okta Integration Network is already incredibly vast, covering more than 6,500 integrations for cloud, on-premises, and mobile applications. But it can’t cover all applications under the sun. So we use the available Okta technology to make the best connector possible in the shortest time possible, so that organisations can automate identity lifecycle and keep their systems in sync with Okta. So far, we’ve created connectors for AFAS, TOPdesk, and GitLab, which are used by many organisations and are available in the Okta Integrated Network for many more that might need them in the future.

Next, we aim to focus more on CIAM initiatives for our customers to help them quickly launch new applications for their own customers, while ensuring a unified and enjoyable user experience across their channels. Customers want simplicity, convenience, and good services, and CIAM plays a key part in how organisations deliver that. There are great possibilities in this field and we’re excited about what we can do for our customers in the future with Okta’s off-the-shelf CIAM solutions.

Read more about FuseLogic’s journey as an Okta partner here.  Interested in partnership opportunities with Okta? Visit https://www.okta.com/partners/.