Signing up partners is easy. Building effective partnerships is another story. I have spent the last 20 years working on different software partnering structures. Between HP, BroadVision, Salesforce.com and SuccessFactors, I have learned a lot about what it takes to create a great partnership. I am now working on a new startup with some old…

In taking a moment to gather thoughts as the BigIdeas Conference wraps ups here in Chicago, it’s clear that we had a great show. Two of the themes of the show were “customer success” and “have fun” and the BigMachines folks really delivered on both aspects. First, it’s cool to work with great partners like BigMachines who build products that…

Building Okta over the last 18 months has proven to be an exciting ride. When people ask Todd and me "what has surprised you most", Todd being the wiser one often answers something very simple, profound and true like "everything takes longer than you think." I often tend to offer something more pedestrian (and less profound, but equally true)…

We are very pleased to share that CRN has recently named Okta one of the top 10 solutions delivering new functionality to the Cloud. Long-trusted as one of the premier publications for channel and reseller partners, its outstanding to receive this type of validation from the editors at CRN! With a growing number of accolades for Okta, from both…

Part II: Bringing the Consumer Experience to Okta That was then, this is now Fortunately for all of us enterprise application users, today’s environment is very different from the one I described in Part I of this post. As Eric mentioned in his recent post, the consumerization of IT is underway. Enterprise software companies are now being held to…

Part I: Why Enterprise Software Has Such a Bad Rep We are all consumers. The experience we have with products in our personal lives helps set expectations for any product that we interact with – the enterprise software we use at work included. In the past, that software was infamous for being complicated and costly, and the user experience for…

The fine folks over at SearchCloudComputing named Okta as one of their top 10 cloud computing startups this morning. We're proud and flattered to be included with such a powerful group of new technology companies that are clearly poised to disrupt. Everyday we're getting great feedback from our customers and its incredibly exciting to see some…

Much has been written in the last few years about the macro level changes impacting enterprise software. The phrase Consumerization of IT has been used widely to describe how consumer technologies are penetrating the enterprise (iPhones, Skype, Facebook, Twitter), and how enterprise IT products are changing to provide more consumer-like…

Back in February of this year, we closed our Series A round of financing. We haven't announced it until now - we've been too focused on building our product, our team and making our customers successful. Now that enough people are asking we wanted to communicate more broadly about the investment, our backers and how we're putting those funds to…

At Okta we’re very bullish on the cloud. Our name literally means cloud cover. At a high level, we believe that cloud computing, and applications and systems delivered as services are a fundamentally better way to build corporate IT. They will make companies run more effectively and efficiently and make them more competitive. Rolling it all up,…