Okta and Oktana: Working Together

At Oktana, we’re proud of the work we’ve done and the companies we’ve had the opportunity to work with. Our goal with this blog is to share some of the work we’ve been doing and in turn highlight the things that make us good partners for those that may need help in the Salesforce space. One of our most recent partners -Okta- is one we’d like to highlight. Okta fast-growing technology company with a strong emphasis on enterprise security. Its focus is on the development of single sign-on systems for enterprise clients that allow users to log in to a number of services, including Gmail, Salesforce, and Slack all with one username and password. The success Okta has been experiencing has led to our partners so that we can assist them in their growth and capture key processes needed for such growth to be as smooth as possible.

Okta needed a partner to supplement its internal development team to achieve greater bandwidth, higher quality, and faster development cycles. In the process, we’ve become a part of Okta’s team and integrated ourselves into their workflow acting almost as an extension of the existing engineering team. Working together on projects with a goal of acting like one team even in an environment where everyone is collocated is something we’ve been doing for a long time. We can do it and we can do it really well. One of the key factors in the decision-making process that gravitated Okta to Oktana was the appreciation for transparency, honesty, and integrity when critically examining the work to be done and recognizing as a team the challenges we may face along the way as well as their solutions.

With that goal in mind, we have been working closely on a number of different projects. The biggest being an important refactoring exercise of their entire codebase. As mentioned earlier, growth is occurring so fast that they need to improve logic and code across the board is imperative to their ability scale. Oktana has become the face of this effort by spearheading improvements and encouraging the adoption of best practice principles that will lower maintenance costs and leverage Salesforce release improvements better.

This type of customer engagement is one that fits perfectly into our wheelhouse. The key elements of this project that we want to highlight are:

  • Apex/Visualforce
  • Salesforce Lightning and Lightning Components
  • Salesforce CPQ
  • Agile
  • Velocity
  • Quality
  • Transparency
  • Integrity
  • Honesty

Beyond our specific project described in this blog post, we’re also supporting Okta by helping improve its internal development processes. With the refactoring exercise, we’ve been slowly and subtly making the development process smoother and more streamlined for their team and helping them improve their scrum process as well. We are honored to get the chance to help an amazing organization such as Okta and hope we continue helping others in this same capacity.

If you are a Salesforce partner looking to partner with experts to help you provide the best custom app development solutions to your clients Contact us. Our team will give you more information about these services. 

Showcase – Gonzalo

It’s time once again to shine the spotlight on one of the fantastic members of our Oktana family, Gonzalo Parada! Gonzalo is Oktana’s Demos and Proof of Concepts team lead. In his two years at Oktana, he has grown to be a key member of our team.

 

Gonzalo

Gonzalo has been working in Salesforce development since 2011 and joined the Oktana family in 2017. In that time he’s worked on a wide variety of different projects including some product demos you may have seen at some major conferences. These demos are seen by millions of people and we know Gonzalo is immensely proud of the team’s accomplishments and his contributions to them. We love that our work makes it onto these big stages and Gonzalo is a huge part of how we make that happen.

At his core, Gonzalo is a Salesforce developer. He’s an expert in the field and it shows in all his work. A self-styled Hardcore Salesforce Developer, Gonzalo has worked on it all, from apex, visualforce, lightning components, service cloud, sales cloud, and communities, whether it’s for the classic Salesforce experience or Lightning he’s got it covered. Additionally, Gonzalo is one of the only members of our team to have three Salesforce certifications under his belt, Platform App Builder, Platform Developer I, and Platform Developer II.

Dreamforce 2018 (Continuous Integration using Salesforce DX)

Gonzalo is very comfortable getting up in front of a crowd as well. He’s lead training sessions internally at Oktana on topics such as developing for the new Lightning Web Components framework. And just like a number of our fantastic team members Gonzalo has had the opportunity to travel and share his skills with the wider Salesforce developer community. In 2018 he was fortunate enough to be able to lead a presentation at Dreamforce with fellow Oktana Showcase developer Carlos titled “Continuous Integration using Salesforce DX”. Both of them were thrilled by the opportunity and have nothing but great things to say about the experience.

Though you might assume Gonzalo thinks about nothing but Salesforce that’s not actually the case. A lover of technology, Gonzalo is always on top of what’s new and cool in the tech world. He’s also a bit of a gamer and is currently working his way through Resident Evil 2 on his PS4. But the thing he enjoys more than anything is when it’s time to travel with his family and visit new places. Next month they’re actually heading to the western United States for a road trip! They’ll be hitting San Francisco, Yosemite National Park, Las Vegas, The Grand Canyon, and Los Angeles before heading all the back to SF to wrap things up.

Post-Dreamforce 2018

In closing Gonzalo’s message about his experience here at Oktana is a simple one, “Oktana is a great place to work… But the most important thing is that you are always learning new things and improving your career.” And on some level that’s what we’re always striving for. We want the best people to be here working together not just for the sake of the company or our clients but also for the sake of themselves. We’re always learning and growing and we’re thrilled to have someone like Gonzalo here to grow with us.