Squareball: Okta’s 1st CIAM-Focused Premier Partner in DACH

Customer expectations seem to grow more demanding by the day. Big brands are championing seamless digital experiences and similar businesses are expected to follow suit. But ease of use alone isn’t enough. Customers also want companies to protect their personal data in a way that doesn’t add friction to their platform. To square these customer needs, businesses need to build experiences that take identity into account at every step. Enter Squareball.

Squareball is a Berlin-based consulting company that helps its customers build products that deliver simple and secure user experiences—with identity at their core. As Okta’s first DACH partner fully focused on Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM), Squareball is creating a new standard for seamless and secure digital experiences. In this blog, Martyn Roberts, Product Manager, and IAM Consultant at Squareball talks about the intersection of product management, design, engineering, and identity, and the challenges of bringing it all together.

No doubt about it: we’re a fairly niche company. There aren’t that many product consultancies with identity credentials around—but that’s slowly starting to change. Why? Because businesses have realised that it’s getting harder and harder to build frictionless and secure customer experiences without putting identity at the centre. And that’s exactly what we can help with.

At Squareball, we enable businesses to implement sustainable identity strategies and launch apps and products that are truly user-focused. Our team combines various disciplines and backgrounds, from identity to product management, to design, engineering, and development. By bringing all those credentials together in a package that’s tailored to each of our clients, we deliver the same depth of commitment to each project as if we were an in-house team.

When tackling a new project, we always focus our approach on three main areas: identity consultancy, design & engineering, and product management. Everything we do is oriented around choosing the right frameworks and technologies, and stitching them together to create the ideal product solution architecture for our customers. But we’re not doing it alone. We implement these solutions with select, trusted technology partners. Partners like Okta.

Our journey with Okta began in 2019 when we discovered our shared commitment to shaping CIAM’s future in the DACH region, which comprises Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. But Okta’s dedication to this market was just one of many reasons we were such a great fit for a partnership. At Squareball, we’re all about tailoring our approach and solutions to each customer, and the versatility of the Okta platform allows us to do just that. And because CIAM is only part of our customers’ identity strategy, Okta’s proficiency across B2C, B2B, and B2E spaces makes it an attractive one-in-all solution for them.

Today, we’re delighted to be Okta’s first DACH partner with a dedicated CIAM focus. In our two years of working together, we’ve already got quite a few success stories under our belt. Take Zeotap, a German Customer Data Solutions company, which worked with us to implement Single Sign-On across multiple platforms, and connect their B2B business partners with federated logins. Within six weeks, we delivered a build that was ready for release, which was only possible thanks to our close working relationship with the Okta team and its daily support.

Drawing on our team’s varied experience across sectors, including banking and government, we’re happy to tackle these identity challenges in highly-regulated environments, such as FinTech. But the relevance of CIAM isn’t limited to a specific industry or type of business, and neither are we. Whether our customer is a pioneering startup or an established enterprise platform, whether they’ve already got a clear product vision, or they are still in the discovery stage: we’re here to help.

Right now, we’re helping an ambitious startup called CAD-Ray to build an innovative cloud-based 3D CAD solution for the dental industry. As the field service team, we’ll manage the entire project from concept through delivery. It’s a brand-new solution, and getting as many people involved as possible will require a smooth and seamless customer experience — and, with Okta, that’s what we can deliver.

The product is still in its early stages, but if there’s anything we’ve learned so far, it’s that things can move fast when you’ve got the right identity roadmap. Thanks to our partnership with Okta, we never have to start that roadmap from scratch: With Okta’s engineering team and a world of support resources always at our fingertips, we can ensure more efficient rollouts, achieving a faster ROI for our customers.

There’s so much we’ve already achieved since we teamed up with Okta. Our entire identity team has become Okta-certified, we’ve moved up the ranks from Select to Premier Partner status, and most importantly, we’ve been able to successfully launch a number of projects with our customers.

With every new success, we’re becoming a bit less “niche”. That’s because, with every happy customer, businesses are catching on to the benefits of combining product management and design & engineering skills with identity credentials. It’s the ideal mix of expertise that’s needed to deliver the kinds of seamless customer experiences people are asking for.

We’re more excited than ever to be pioneers in this space — and to have a partner like Okta at our side.

Read more about Squareball’s journey as an Okta partner here.

To learn more about partnership opportunities with Okta, visit https://www.okta.com/uk/partners/.