At SMC, Okta provides a single source of identity truth

Bob Stephan:  SMC is a manufacturing company. We're located in the Midwest, Indianapolis, Indiana. We're the North American headquarters. We're globally owned. Our parent's in Japan. We have a global sales network. We have manufacturing interests in Europe and Asia along with North America.

We don't have a formal cloud initiative in our organization but every time we look for a solution to the business, the cloud is there. More and more we're finding it's easier to go to the cloud to find that solution. In the old world it was active directory and multiple directories in the organization. We would build application security around groups and roles on an application but we didn't really care about how they got into the environment, so an identity management wasn't a huge concern in the application space.

When we started thinking about Okta and I got involved in that project, I got much more aware of identity management, how important it was and how we need to start thinking about identity management across all our systems. The latest project workday provisioning I'm using Okta as the source of truth in our IT portion of our company, and universal directory is the main player.

Okta's universal directory provides us an on-demand, up-to-date attribute list for everything I need to know about an employee. We service the data from workday to universal directory. We can push it to any other system. The rest API that Okta's provided for us makes it easy to deal with integrations that Okta doesn't have out of the box. It's the coolest thing that we've got.

So when we brought Okta in and talked to them, we just hit it off with the people. The sales representative, the technical sales engineer they brought in, there seemed to be a connection there. We talked to other providers and all things being equal, I decided it would be better to work with the people from Okta. I just felt like they cared more about my situation, they cared more about what we were trying to do. They saw what our vision was. The other vendors seemed to be more vendors. We have a product that we go with and sell it to you.

From an IT perspective, Okta's best features are the self-service password reset. In the old world with active directory, there was no self-service password reset. Every time somebody forgot the password, we took a help desk call. In the new world with Okta linked tightly with active directory, users can reset their own passwords so that was a huge savings for IT just from a manual time and effort.

One of the best features about Okta from an end user's perspective is the ability to have access to the applications that we offer from anywhere anytime, whether they're sitting at home in front of a PC, with their iPad on the couch, whether they're at work, and not having to memorize the passwords that they use to access its applications. The love of Okta is growing. Adoption continues to grow. People that are using Okta and see the power of it are asking for more things. I'm a firm believer that user adoption leads to success. Without user adoption, we can't have success.