Customer story: SailPoint

About this story: In early 2023, Seczetta (a SaaS-based identity tool that helps companies manage access to their data when third parties need access to it) was acquired by SailPoint Technologies. Rebranded as SailPoint Non-Employee Risk Management, Strivacity continues to serve as the CIAM solution for this branch of SailPoint’s portfolio. What follows is the SecZetta CIAM story.

The situation

SecZetta was growing quickly and increased demands from partners were straining their current support processes. Ideally, SecZetta’s partners needed to do two distinct things in the partner portal: access training courses and spin up on-demand free trial environments to support product-led growth sales motions.

As he watched the partner requests grow, Taylor Hook, Senior Solutions Architect, knew that the current portal – built on SharePoint and Active Directory – wouldn’t scale to meet their growing needs. “When we first built our partner portal, everyone needed a Microsoft Azure account in order to access it. That was fine in our early days, but as our partner network expanded a lot of them didn’t have Azure accounts so we had to create them. This account creation process quickly became a time suck for our engineering team and pulled us away from other priorities,” said Taylor.

When Taylor scoped the new partner portal requirements, he decided the partner portal needed its own user management system, “Buying a user management tool to control access to the partner portal was the clear choice for us. Our engineering team has zero time to build and maintain a resource like that,” stated Taylor.

Evaluating options

Taylor identified three “must have” requirements for their user management tool:

1. A single place to manage all users
2. Seamless integration with WordPress, the CMS they used to build the new portal
3. The ability to check entitlements against Salesforce

When evaluating vendors, Taylor quickly realized that Strivacity met all their criteria.

Preparing for launch

Switching over to Strivacity as the gateway for their partner portal was straightforward. Taylor and team used Strivacity’s menu-driven approach to integrate Salesforce, WordPress and Microsoft Active Directory, for starters. They also used SAML2 for implementing Single Sign On (SSO) capabilities so that SecZetta’s partners could authenticate to the portal with their own SSO providers if they wanted.

Additionally, Taylor’s team had created several APIs to support activities around their partner portal, and they were able to use Strivacity’s APIs to easily integrate them without having to rebuild any of that functionality.

Once Taylor and team were ready to turn on Strivacity and kick the new partner portal live, the switch took less than a day.

The benefits of partnering with Strivacity

Using Strivacity’s Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) platform to power the user management system for SecZetta’s partner portal not only offered a secure, easy-to-use experience for the company’s partners, it also delivered multiple benefits for its engineering and marketing teams.

Quick and simple integrations for pre-built APIs

Since partners would be able to launch trials directly from the portal without a human in the loop, Taylor and his team needed to ensure that they were authorized to do so. To automate this process his team used Strivacity’s pre-built APIs and on-platform orchestration capabilities. They created an event hook directly in Strivacity to run entitlement checks so that new partners attempting to log into the system would be checked against SecZetta’s own internal request database before being granted access to the partner portal.

“Strivacity’s orchestration capabilities are outstanding – this was a major selling point for our team,” said Taylor. “I love that we can easily build our own integrations right in the Strivacity platform, no ticketing requests or service agreements required.”

Faster approval processes for new partners and free trials

Before implementing Strivacity, SecZetta’s partner marketing team needed to manually approve new partners when they requested access to training and other resources. After the partner marketing team approved a new user, they would route the request back to engineering to give that user access.

This was a “very slow” process, Taylor said. To help expedite the creation of new users and cut down on the number of people involved, Taylor and his team created another event hook in the system for new user requests. “With Strivacity, our partner marketing team can now approve a new user in seconds with a single click, as opposed to slogging through the multi-day process we used to follow.”

The same goes for spinning up on-demand free trial instances of the product. “This used to take days and now, with Strivacity, our partners can do this right in the portal in minutes, which keeps the momentum going in their sales process,” Taylor said.

More personalized outreach and partner enablement

With Strivacity now in place, SecZetta’s partner marketing team can correlate users’ login data with the training and resources that they use within the portal. This visibility helps them send more personalized messages and training recommendations to each user. “The team likes that they can easily match Strivacity login data with data from our learning management system (LMS), Learn Dash. For example, if a user logged in but didn’t take any training yet, we know to send that person a message suggesting initial training sessions that might be useful to them based on their role or interests,” Taylor said.

Future plans

As Taylor and his team continue to add more resources and features to their partner portal, they’re happy to have an easy-to-use user management system that they can easily customize with a new API or event hook integration.

“Looking ahead, we’re hoping to add other, more complex integrations to our Strivacity instance so that we can customize the portal for our partners even further,” said Taylor. “We’ve already started working on some new integrations with Salesforce. One of those will create a pop-up message that displays a user’s specific deal opportunities when they first log in.”

With Strivacity, they know these additional customizations won’t require lengthy development sprints.

“Strivacity makes it easy to add to the platform in the way that works best for us and our partners. Having that flexibility in our user management system is a game changer for us.”
– TAYLOR HOOK, Senior Solutions Architect