The connection that helps Wilbur-Ellis sales people spend days out in the field

Dan Willey: Wilbur-Ellis Company operates in three different divisions. The primary division in the U.S.is our agribusiness division where we sell crop inputs to growers throughout the country. We also have a specialty chemical company that exports specialty chemicals to Asia. Then we have a forage division that exports feed to Asia and imports pet food components into the U.S. In many of our instances in dealing with our customers, we are in the field, but in the agribusiness side of things we are literally in the field. Mobility is extremely important for us to be able to communicate to our salespeople who are working with growers onsite to make sure that we can give them what they need.

We were looking at several systems that were cloud-based, that would require their own identity management to deal with them, all of it at a single point and time. We had the UltiPro roll out. We had the training roll out. We also had a regulatory and compliance system that we needed to support. That was at the point where we quickly realized that we needed something that would support all of them because it would just be too much work and we would have to hire more administrators to do that kind of work.

Some of the big reasons that we chose Okta for our identity management solution was, number one, it was there when we needed it. We had a very tight timeline to deliver this access option and we were able to do a proof of concept, validated it, that it worked with a number of applications and get it rolled out within three months. We don't have them all on there yet, but we want to put all of our internal applications on there as well. In going forward, we want to have a solution ready for customer access and customer portal accessandI knew that Okta could do that, too. I had a desire to be cloud-based and strictly cloud-based, and not a hybrid solution, so when we looked for Okta or we looked for the solution, Okta was really the only one in that space that did not have any onsite or on-prem component to it. It interacts with active directory,but it didn't need to be onsite to do that.

Okta's a great company to work with and I think there's a couple of reasons for that. Number one, it's a young company and it treats every customer as they're important. Number two, when we did our POC, they were there with us and they really pushed it through and number three, in really talking about the future, I feel like, as a company, we have more ability to direct where Okta should go. Like I said, so far they've been very attentive in understanding what our needs are in the future and how we can help Okta get there as well.