Ryan Sydor, head of Okta Canada Six months ago, Ryan Sydor, Okta’s area vice president and country manager for Canada, joined In The Channel to explain what the vendor’s Canadian investment actually looked like: a Canadian data cell based in Montreal, more than 600 employees in country, and a plan to triple the business. At Oktane 2026 in Las Vegas this week, we ran the conversation back – and the story has changed. The shift, Sydor says, is demand. Agentic AI has moved from conference panel fodder to board mandate, and that’s opening doors that weren’t open in March, including at organizations that run Microsoft Entra and aren’t considering an identity migration. Okta’s answer, announced at the conference, is Okta for AI agents – agent discovery, runtime governance, and an Agent Gateway – plus the Blueprint Alliance, a cross-vendor group built on the premise that no single vendor can secure AI agents alone. The numbers back the demand story up. Sydor says Okta Canada’s partner contribution is up more than 100 per cent year over year, driven less by new logos than by existing partners stepping up, and Canadian customers are raising data sovereignty in deals that never used to ask. In this episode, we also get into Todd McKinnon’s keynote line that the biggest competition is confusion, why Sydor’s ask of his own team is to sell better rather than sell more, and why his partners are asking Okta to bring them in earlier. His bottom line for Canadian MSPs is the one the industry has been preaching for years: identity is security – and 80 per cent of breaches involve it. Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last sixteen years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show. Back in March, I sat down with Ryan Sydor, the head of Okta Canada, at a moment when the story was investment: a Canadian data cell in Montreal, with a Calgary failsafe, an engineering hub in Toronto, more than 600 employees across the country, and a plan to triple the business. Last week at Oktane in Las Vegas, we ran it back – because in six months, the story has changed. Agentic AI has gone from conference panel fodder to board mandate. Okta has launched the Blueprint Alliance on the premise that no single vendor can secure AI agents alone. And in Canada, Ryan says partner contribution is up more than 100 per cent year over year. We got into all of it: how the identity conversation has evolved since March, how Okta positions itself when the customer already runs Microsoft Entra, what Todd McKinnon meant when he said the biggest competition is confusion, and why Ryan’s biggest ask of his own team is not to sell more, but to sell better. Let’s get right into it, my chat with Ryan Sydor. Ryan, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. I’m sure it’s a busy week here at Oktane. Ryan Sydor: Yeah, good to see you again, Rob. It is a very busy week. Exciting week. A lot of good energy. Robert Dutt: The crucial question, as we sit down – this is partway through day two of the conference – how many dinners did you have last night? Ryan Sydor: There’s two dinners. Two dinners tonight. You just got to watch how much you eat. That’s all. But I find that these dinners are really important. Great chances to sit down with customers, get to know them on a personal level, and certainly it makes talking about business much easier. Robert Dutt: Yeah, absolutely. We last chatted about six months ago, give or take. How has the overall discussion around identity, and specifically around agentic identity, evolved in Canada since that conversation? Ryan Sydor: Yeah, I think back six months ago – or 15 years, as it’s known in the real world. It really does feel that way. Things have changed and have sped up in a way that I don’t think we’ve seen in a long time. The way we were thinking about agentic AI and how it ought to fit, and the conversations we’re having, has accelerated so much. I think it’s the customers who are sitting around thinking about how important AI is to their business models, their need to innovate, their need to be more efficient, and that there’s a fear. How do we do this? How do we protect ourselves? We are having more conversations than I think we expected. Conversations are opening doors that maybe weren’t open in the past, because customers are looking for a solution. They’re looking for advice. I think it’s an unusual time where no one really knows what the next six months look like, because it happened so fast. They’re looking for partners. It’s not a vendor model. They’re looking for partners who can come in and advise them. That’s a big change. On top of that, what we’re seeing is there’s a focus on it in a way that we haven’t seen in the past, where boards are mandating it. It’s amazing how things get done when the board mandates something. Robert Dutt: It does tend to be a big motivator in business, that’s for sure. Do you find that the light has gone on more than in the past in terms of connecting the dots between, “Yes, we have to secure our AI,” and a big part of that is the identity side of the equation, as opposed to some of the other aspects of security that companies inevitably have to deal with? Ryan Sydor: I do. Two parts to that. I think, again, because the board brings it up, it’s a focus priority. You have the business who’s thinking about how they can use AI to be better, and then you have security who’s trying to figure out how to protect it. We’re often talking about both. How do we speak to both sides? How do we work with them? How do we partner with them? The other thing I’ll say is Canadians are doing a good job of innovating, but we’re still probably a bit behind what you might see in other parts of North America. So when it comes to working with some of our Okta for AI deals and these types of conversations, we’re catching up. We don’t see as many of those conversations yet, and it’s nice to see that as we move into the fall, those are really picking up on our side. As customers are realizing, “We didn’t have a strategy, we need to talk to a partner” – and then we’re talking to us. Now, this is not just people who are doing business with Okta, who have this as their identity provider, but also those who are not, saying, “I need to find best in breed. I need to have a solution, and I’ll talk to everybody.” From a business perspective, we like that. Robert Dutt: What are your partners doing with ramping along with that ramp up in the business conversation? The one does tend to lead to the other. I’m just curious in terms of capacity, ability to meet the demand that is growing out there. How’s the partner base doing today? Ryan Sydor: I think they’re doing very well. I think there’s two sides of it. One, it’s about the conversations. Two, then it’s about the technology. I know we’re working with partners, training them up so that they’re able to actually roll out our AI solution. But I think you were in Todd’s keynote, and he said that the biggest competition is confusion. I think what we’re seeing is that the need for us to work with our partners more closely, and the need for us and our partners to work with our customers more closely, because it’s like the car is moving really fast in a way that we’re not used to. I used to drive, traveling at 100 kilometres an hour. Now it’s going 150, and it feels a little uncomfortable. You want to have people in that car with you that can help you make proper decisions. And so it’s us working together with our partners, with the customers, really to understand: What is it they’re doing? Where do they want to go? What is the safest way to do it? What are others doing? What mistakes are happening? How do we learn from what the previous company did so that we can accelerate the technology faster and allow for the innovation faster in a way that you still have visibility and control over your AI agents? And so that’s brought us closer together with our partners, that need to make sure that it’s not a vendor relationship, it’s a trust relationship. Because when things are moving fast, you want to work with somebody you trust. Robert Dutt: It’s funny you mentioned that. That exact quote is something that, during the keynote, looking at things as I do from a partner, a channel-centric lens, it kind of struck me as the inverse – or at least working hand in hand – with the old channel maxim of where there’s mystery, there’s margin, because you can just kind of take out the word mystery, replace with confusion, same story. The Blueprint Alliance is kind of built on the idea that no single vendor can secure agents alone, because – it’s a big, the security world, this is not breaking news, is a big world with a lot of different players. We talked on the idea that Canadian customers tend to be on the more cautious side, and that’s kind of the trend. Do you think cross-vendor architecture like Blueprint resonates more strongly in Canada than, say, a single stack pitch would? Ryan Sydor: I don’t think that’s even a Canadian thing. I wouldn’t say that’s a specific Canadian need. I think it’s for all customers. I think that joint collaboration amongst companies creates that. First of all, it calls out the fact that there’s no one solution that solves everything. And the fact that the more smart companies you have working together, focused on a priority of security and allowing for safe innovation – that it’s not just a solution you’re trying to sell. It’s not like a widget. It is a partnership. It is an alliance. And I think that creates a level of trust and safety that I think Canadian companies would appreciate. But I
