The promos for VMware Workspace ONE Advanced and VMware Workspace ONE Enterprise are specifically for joint Okta-VMware channel partners.
Identity management provider Okta and VMware announced a major extension of their previous partnership last May. Okta is now looking to drive their VMware business further with the announcement of two new promos, available only through their channel, that encourage VMware Workspace ONE customers to take advantage of the Okta Identity Cloud.
“We had been partnered with VMware for a while through integrations and joint customer relationships,” said Nick Fisher, Group Product Marketing Manager of security products at Okta. “The expansion of the relationship in May provided for more strategic integrations, involving both product and go-to-market integration, as well as commitment to road map items. We both agreed to allocate product and engineering resources, and pledged to fulfill those commitments on both ends.” Okta also does integrations with some of the other unified endpoint management vendors, but their relationship with VMware is now deeper.
Fisher said there is a fair degree of overlap between their channel and VMware’s.
“Our channel has been selling them, as we overlap to a considerable degree at the distributor level,” he said. “It’s a significant overlap.”
The new promos are designed to drive interest among that channel in selling Okta for VMware Workspace ONE Advanced and Okta for VMware Workspace ONE Enterprise. VMware Workspace ONE is an intelligence-driven digital workspace platform that combines unified endpoint management capabilities with device compliance and conditional access, for more secure access to business apps. VMware created it in 2016 by integrating the capabilities of VMware Horizon View desktop virtualization, AirWatch mobile management, CloudVolumes app layering software and Horizon Air desktop-as-a-service into a single integrated offering. The Enterprise version is the upgraded one, with some additional functionality like configurable historical dashboards, the ability to measure app utilization in the environment, and a rich automation process.
“The first package is Okta for VMware Workspace ONE Advanced,” Fisher said. “It provides a zero trust access model, using our multi-factor authentication and single sign-on capabilities. We take the context integration from VMware and pair it with our trust features to determine if an event is a trusted event and allow access. We are also improving the user experience by enabling a password-less experience. We enable one touch access into the application if it is managed. If it isn’t, there is a prompt for a push notification.”
The second package, for Okta for VMware Workspace ONE Enterprise, adds on Okta’s Lifecycle Management and automated provisioning and de-provisioning to HR systems.
“This takes everything from the Advanced offer and adds in lifecycle management,” Fisher indicated. “The HR capabilities are also important, for things like making sure people who leave are automatically deprovisioned so they don’t become a security risk. Many organizations today are moving beyond Active Directory as their source of truth, and adding in HR Master systems like Workday or SuccessFactors.”
Both bundles offer special pricing discounts. The promotion and the pricing discounts are scheduled to run between November 5, 2018 and April 30, 2019.
