Businesses at Work

When we break out our most popular apps by region, we find some striking differences. At the top of our ranks, we see that the new second-place global rank for AWS is driven by its strong growth in EMEA and APAC, where it has seen over 25% growth since April, 2020, compared to 16% growth in North America during the same time period. 

For many apps, their popularity in North America drives their rank on the charts. Salesforce and Zoom’s global ranks are underpinned by their popularity in North America: each ranks two spots lower in APAC and three spots lower in EMEA. 

But some apps find their sweet spots outside of North America. While the Atlassian Product Suite (headquartered in Sydney, Australia) ranks sixth on our global list and in North America, it ranks third in EMEA and APAC, beating out such popular tools as Salesforce and Google Workspace. Other examples of higher rankings in EMEA include Slack (1 spot higher than in North America), Zendesk (6 spots higher), and GitHub (4 spots higher). 

Some apps that don’t appear in our global rankings make cameo appearances in regional breakdowns. Social media giant Twitter left our global top apps in 2017, but in EMEA, Twitter still sits in the top 15. Jamf Pro, our #1 fastest growing app in 2018 and a recurring fastest growing app through 2020, appears in the EMEA top 15. And APAC customers’ deployment puts ServiceNow (IT service management support), Mimecast (email security), Xero (small business accounting, headquartered in Wellington, NZ), and Palo Alto Networks GlobalProtect (network security) into APAC’s top 15. 

The platform effect

Apps secure a solid foothold at the top

Some of the apps Okta connects to serve as platforms in their own right: moving beyond specific functionality, companies can build on top of these platforms, integrating their functionality into other systems, and even baking the platform’s underlying technology into the company’s own app stack. These platforms become a core, integral part of the company’s operating technology and would be expensive and cumbersome to replace. They have long-term staying power because they are so intertwined with how business gets done.

How do platforms rank among our customers’ app usage? Since our first report in 2015, Microsoft 365, Salesforce, and Google Workspace have held three of our top four spots. They may have rebranded once or twice, but they are embedded in our desktops and our work lives. Since 2015, AWS has improved its global rank by number of customers from #6 to #2. And Atlassian, ranked #6 globally by number of customers, has built a pervasive platform for developers. Network effects amplify the staying power of these platforms, making it easier to adopt and integrate new pieces of technology to solve evolving problems.

The average number of apps deployed per customer has risen steadily across all industries and company sizes, for a combined growth of 22% over the past four years. This year, the average number of apps per customer remains at 88.

We broke that out by customer size and found that our largest customers are adopting more apps than our smaller customers. Our larger customers, with 2,000 or more employees, deploy an average of 175 apps per customer, while our smaller customers, with 1,999 or fewer employees, deploy an average of 73 apps per customer.

New customers tend to initially deploy fewer apps through the OIN, then add more over time. Customers who have been with Okta for less than a year adopt an average of 23 apps. That number increases to 55 apps between one to two years, and 101 apps between two to four years. This year we see that customers who have been with Okta for four years or more deploy an average of 207 apps, an increase of 9% over the previous year. At the high end of the app deployment scale, 10% of our customers deploy 199 apps or more.

When we break out app deployment by industry, it makes sense to see technology companies at the high end of the spectrum. These organisations live, breathe, and even build the tools they are using. In the past three years, their average number of apps has increased 57% from 99 to 155, with 17% growth in the past year.

Other sectors have seen significant growth in app adoption as well. Over the past four years, the government sector has had the largest increase in average app deployment at 140%, which includes a 43% jump in the past year alone — the largest increase in any sector in the past year. Remote work has driven governments to deploy a wide range of apps and tools that were previously a much lower priority, if not completely unnecessary. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics monthly Current Population Survey consistently found public-sector employees working remotely at a higher-than-average rate: 57% of government employees worked remotely in May, which dropped steadily to 34% in September, compared to the entire economy, where 35% worked remotely in May, dropping to 23% in September.

The education sector ranks high in app deployment, with more tempered growth. While their average app deployment trend line has increased over the past few years, they did see a dip down to an average of 119 apps per customer in 2019. However, in 2020 the education sector’s average number of apps rose 6% year over year, possibly as they ramped up to provide remote learning.

Some of the other industries seeing large increases in average app adoption this year include professional services (36% increase), healthcare and pharmaceuticals (19% increase), and finance and banking (18% increase). Retail average app deployment grew 7% in the past year, but 58% over the past four years.

Best of breed rules, incumbents drool

As employees settle into remote work, it’s critical they have the best tools to keep them connected and working productively. When it comes to interacting with co-workers, customers, partners, vendors, and others on a common platform, we see that for many companies, a “good enough” solution isn’t actually good enough. We’re seeing that “one size fits all” is not fitting, at all.

Over the past few years, we have looked at whether companies that invest in the Microsoft 365 suite — the most popular app in our network — are finding it meets all their needs. We also wonder if deploying Microsoft 365 means customers commit to an exclusively Microsoft environment. The answer to both questions is decisively “no.” While the Microsoft 365 suite offers basic personal productivity, communication, collaboration, and content management tools, Okta’s Microsoft 365 customers continue to invest in many other best-of-breed apps. And when they need CRM software, project management tools, data visualisation software, or cloud platforms, they look for bestof- breed options as well. Over the past five years, the number of Okta’s Microsoft 365 customers deploying at least one best of breed app has increased by seven percentage points.

Like the strictly-controlled French designations of “champagne” or “cognac,” “best of breed” is a distinction we don’t take lightly. Best-of-breed apps dominate their category for the standalone functionality they provide. This year, best-of-breed tools Salesforce, AWS, Box, Slack, and Zoom are joined by project management tool Smartsheet and data visualisation tool Tableau, which compete against Microsoft Project and Power BI, respectively.

Microsoft Teams comes standard with the Microsoft 365 Business Basic subscription, but during a global shift to video meetings, video classes, and video cocktail hours, companies increasingly dialled in to Zoom. Over 42% of Okta’s Microsoft 365 customers now also deploy Zoom, a jump of more than 10 percentage points over the previous year. (This number has increased nearly 35 percentage points in the past four years.) And when it comes to chatting, Slack is also part of the conversation. The rate of increase has slowed, but this year nearly 32% of Okta’s Microsoft 365 customers also deploy Slack. And, while they most certainly have access to OneDrive, a standard feature in even the most basic Microsoft 365 bundle, 26% also deploy Box.

The most popular apps by category

The user experience is critical for workforce apps as well. All the most popular tools across our categories delivered amazing digital experiences during the pandemic, and that's why they're winning.

When we delve into our data, we sort categories in two ways. For some workforce-focused categories, such as collaboration apps, developer tools, HR platforms, and video conferencing apps, we look specifically at tools that have been deployed at a company-wide level for corporate use.

Increasingly, however, our work lives and our personal lives intersect. For certain categories, such as travel, health and wellness, and philanthropic efforts, we expand our lens to include apps that employees adopt personally through Okta, in addition to those assigned by their IT teams.

Taking care of business: apps deployed company-wide

As COVID-19 spread rapidly in the spring of 2020 and an unprecedented half of the world’s population, nearly four billion people, went into lockdown, companies quickly deployed new tools to enable employees to work remotely. Collaboration tools come in every size, color, and flavour, but sometimes having too many options can be overwhelming. What do our customers choose for specific collaboration needs? These tools easily walk away with top honours for their specific functionality. This year gave rise to the latest tech stack everyone needs to support a new way of working.

Remote Work Stack

Highlights of our remote work stack:

• Deployment of project management app Smartsheet has grown 170% over the past three years. It boasts around 1.5 times as many Okta customers as its nearest competitor, Asana.
• Box is the top file sharing app, with 59% more Okta customers than its nearest competitor, Dropbox.
• DocuSign is far and away the most popular option for electronic signatures. Deployment has grown 208% in the past three years, and nearly 49% in the past year alone as digital signatures became critical to completing all kinds of transactions. DocuSign has more than seven times as many Okta customers as second-place Adobe Document Cloud.
• Top surveying tool SurveyMonkey has seen nearly 13% growth since February 2020, as companies rushed to understand what their employees needed to work remotely. SurveyMonkey has more than three times as many Okta customers as secondplace Typeform.
• Slack ranks clearly as the top messaging tool, with nearly 190% growth in the past three years. Slack has more than ten times as many Okta customers as the second most popular messaging app, Workplace by Facebook.
• Lucidchart is by far the most popular app for diagramming and wireframing. It has enjoyed 239% growth over the past three years, and has ranked as one of our top apps by unique users for the past two years. Lucidchart has nearly three times as many Okta customers as competitor InVision, and four times as many as our third fastest growing app, Figma.
• The most popular note taking app, Evernote, has seen a rise and fall in popularity, and now has the same number of Okta customers it did three years ago. We’ll keep our eye on competitor Notion, which is rising rapidly through the ranks.

Within days of pandemic lockdowns around the world, use of video conferencing apps skyrocketed, as detailed in our spring supplemental report, Businesses at Work (from Home). Looking at the number of customers, we see a strong inflection point between February and March for both Zoom and Cisco Webex. Deployment of Zoom grew over 45% between March and October, while Webex grew 15% and RingCentral grew 18% during this same period. But 2020 will be remembered as the “year Zoom became a household name.” For the first time, the app became part of many people’s daily lives. Days of Zoom meetings and Zoom classes were capped by evenings of Zoom cocktail hours and Zoom dinners, until “video conferencing fatigue” became a thing.

It’s interesting to contrast the number of customers versus the number of active unique users of competitive apps. While Zoom had more customers than Webex as of February 2018, Zoom had less active unique users than Webex until March 2020, at which point Zoom’s unique user growth rapidly passed Webex and remained higher.

While this year gave remote work a dramatic boost, we think the future of work is dynamic. This translates to a global workforce, in widely distributed locations, working wherever, whenever, and however they want. Gartner predicts "48% of employees at large enterprises will work remotely at least some of the time after the pandemic, a significant increase over the 30% of employees who worked remotely at least some of the time prior to the pandemic.”⁵ Now more than ever, HR departments need a robust set of tools to keep managers and teams connected, support distributed workers, and ensure every employee feels valued.

While HR tools have grown again across the board, employee engagement tools have made especially large gains. With 75% growth in the past year, Culture Amp jumped two spots to pass SAP SuccessFactors and claim fourth place. Lattice, our sixth fastest growing app overall with 109% year-over-year growth, joined the top HR tools for the first time and rose quickly to seventh place.

Large, end-to-end human resources tools continue to attract new customers. Reigning top app Workday has held a solid lead among HR tools with 23% year-over-year growth. Second-place BambooHR has seen more substantial growth, at 38%.

_{[5] Gartner, “9 Predictions for the Post-COVID Future of Work,” May 14, 2020.}

People are notoriously the weakest link in the security chain, and hackers are well aware of the fact. Verizon’s 2020 Data Breach Investigations Report finds that “attackers have become increasingly efficient and lean more toward attacks such as phishing and credential theft,” while there has been a corresponding decrease in attacks using Trojan and RAMscraper malware.⁶

Our customers invest in a wide range of people-centric security tools. This category includes security training, email security and password management, ID proofing, privileged access management (PAM), identity governance and administration (IGA), as well as on-site visitor management tools.

While most tools have seen significant growth in the past few years, our top-ranking tools generally focus on security training, email security, and password management. Security awareness training tool KnowBe4 has grown 46% since the start of 2020, and 194% in the past two years. Our tenth fastest growing app this year, 1Password, has had a major growth spurt of 582% in the past two years. Visitor management tool Envoy is an interesting case: with sharp drops in workers’ physical presence in offices, but growing concerns about managing the number of workers in a space at one time, Envoy — our eighth fastest growing app last year — grew 32% in the past year.

_{[6] Verizon, “2020 Data Breach Investigations Report,” May 19, 2020.}

The balancing act of life and work: corporate + personal app adoption

By the end of 2020, we were marvelling at the layer of dust on our passports and the length of time between our trips to the gas station. Our “big outings” had become dog walks in new parts of town. Most people weren’t getting on a plane unless they absolutely had to. It’s no surprise that the number of airline passengers tanked year over year. Compared to the same month the prior year, there was a -51% change in March, and a whopping -96% change in April, with only small upticks by summer. Our lives seemed frozen in place, and corporate and personal adoption of travel apps generally froze as well. In fact, the ranked order of our hotel and lodging apps stayed exactly the same as last year.

For most of our top hotel and lodging apps, growth was measured in the fractions of percentages, or negative numbers. Bonvoy (the combined rewards program which includes Marriott and Starwood hotels) measured -1% year over year, Hilton Hotels grew 3%, and Hyatt Hotels gained less than 1%.

There was one standout exception in this field. For travellers who ventured out, the option of a private living room won out over a chic hotel lobby, and a private kitchen was more appealing than the all-you-care-to-eat breakfast buffet. Use of popular travel alternative Airbnb saw nearly 11% growth year over year, including 3% growth since the end of February.

Health and wellness meant one thing to us in January when we made our New Year’s resolutions and looked forward to the new decade with eager anticipation. By the end of March the year wasn’t turning out the way we had expected, and health and wellness took on a whole new meaning altogether. Around the world, many workers who were fortunate enough to still have jobs were trying to figure out how to work from home, while some became impromptu school teachers for their children. During this incredibly stressful time, a dedicated few were inspired to turn to exercise to improve their overall well-being, or just to get outside.

Which were more powerful drivers for personal health and wellness: New Year’s resolutions, or pandemic resolutions? It seems we were more collectively focused on January 1. Our gold medal health and wellness app, Fitbit, saw nearly 5% growth in January 2020, compared to 3% growth in April. (Overall, the app saw over 21% growth in 2020.) Growth of silver medal MyFitnessPal was 3% in January, but nearly flat in April. Bronze medal app Strava grew nearly 4% in January, and another 3% in April.

Remember how many of us showed off our homemade sourdough successes (and fails) last spring on Instagram? Well, after more than two months of shelter in place, our kitchen ambitions caught up with us. The surge in WW (formerly Weightwatchers) tipped the scales at over 7% growth over the months of June and July, a bit shy of their 11% growth in January.

In a difficult year, companies embrace Apps for Good

According to Giving USA, Americans gave $450 billion in 2019, reflecting a 5% increase from 2018. But the pandemic and quarantine left tens of millions of people unemployed or underemployed, and sent communities reeling. The need is greater than ever.

Apps for Good helps Okta customers support their employees’ charitable spirits. These unique tools enable companies to simply and securely deploy world-class “giving apps” to their workforces, so employees can donate time, money, expertise, and more. With Apps for Good, companies can select the tools that fit their corporate giving culture and goals, deploy them directly to employees’ Okta dashboards, and start giving back immediately. It’s a nearly frictionless way to make a positive impact.

We’re proud to report that over 930,000 users have been assigned to Apps for Good. Which apps do they use most? More than 50% of Okta customers who have deployed an App for Good are deploying CareerVillage, which connects students with real-life professionals for free personalised career advice; the number of organisations adopting the app (for personal and non-personal use) has grown 91% year over year. The number of companies deploying Kiva, an app that allows people to lend money via the Internet to low-income entrepreneurs and students around the world, has grown 12% year over year. And Benevity, which provides companies a robust giving and volunteering management platform, grew 29% year over year.