Celebrating the Power of You: Announcing Our Oktane Awards Finalists

Our favorite part of Oktane is seeing our Okta ecosystem come to life-- our partners, team, and most importantly, our customers. With this year’s theme being “All You,” we look forward to hearing about the unique ways that you are using Okta and the cloud to transform your organization. Whether it’s automating lifecycle management or securing end users’ many devices, Oktane is the time to show off your extraordinary feats.

One way we do this is with the Oktane Awards. These awards celebrate the individuals who equip their organizations with the right technologies to drive innovative solutions to today’s business challenges. These awards recognize our most brilliant and forward-thinking customers that are achieving ground-breaking results with Okta. These 38 finalists exemplify our theme “All You,” driving change and challenging the status quo, to transform their organizations and industries.

This year we’ve added two new noteworthy award categories: the Booster Award and the Okta for Good Award. The Booster Award recognizes customers who have seen a huge improvement in how Okta increases security and drives team efficiencies for their organization over the past year. The Okta for Good Award goes hand-in-hand with our corporate social impact initiative to support the noble work of our hundreds of nonprofit customers. With this award, we acknowledge the non-profit organizations using the Okta Identity Cloud so that they can worry less about identity management and focus more on their mission.

So without further ado, here are our 2017 finalists:

Atlas: Atlas is the Greek god known for carrying the earth and the heavens on his shoulders. This category recognizes customers who are effectively extending Okta and “doing it all” to manage customers, employees and partner identities on one consolidated platform.

• Tien Dinh- BMC Software
• Adrian Brown- ICAP
• Tony Real- Association of International Certified Professional Accountants
• Eduardo Ibanez- Flex

Believer: This award celebrates our very loyal customers and true believers in the solution, company and future of Okta. We appreciate these individuals who have brought the power of Okta with them to their company and have more than one successful Okta deployment.

• Johan Dowdy- Lyft
• Lee Beech- CRH
• Bryan Yamanaka- WatchGuard Technologies
• Michael Ibbitson- Dubai Airports

Booster: The Booster Award recognizes companies that have demonstrated significant boosts to how the Okta Identity Cloud makes their organization more agile, productive and secure. These Boosters helped untap Okta’s full potential within their company.

• Paul Kelley- Gannett Co., Inc.
• Chris Dias- Logistics Management Institute (LMI)
• Arun DeSouza- Nexteer Automotive
• Neil Boland- Major League Baseball

Builder: This award recognizes the developers who are using Okta as the identity layer for their products and services to better serve the business. Customers in this category are using the Okta Identity Cloud to handle identity and access management so they can focus on building the features their customers care about most.

• Ralph Loura- Rodan & Fields, LLC
• Tyson Malik- Rent-A-Center
• Kenn Bryant- Pitney Bowes
• Edwin Perez- Consolidated Edison Company of New York, Inc. (ConEd)
• Brian Hibma- Amway

Evangelist: The Evangelist Award recognizes top participants in the Okta Advocacy Program. We are blown away by these customer advocates who take advocacy to the next level through their random acts of evangelism. Our advocates are promoting Okta on a global level, and we are incredibly grateful for all of their love and hard work.

• Chandra Sathi- Medidata Solutions
• Alex Lopez- St. Joseph Health System
• Aaron Finnis- Flinders University

Innovator: The Okta Innovators Award is inspired by the customers who have been around for more than 100 years, yet evolve rapidly, are keeping up with the cloud and mobile times to drive modern approaches to IT. This year’s finalists have an average company age of 168 years, with real-estate firm Jones Lang LaSalle taking the lead for being around for over 250 years. These companies take on massive challenges by championing innovation and advocating for cloud solutions to their legacy IT environments.

• John Dunlop- MassMutual
• Vladimir Startsev- Farmers Insurance Group
• Deepesh Chandra- Mount Sinai School of Medicine
• Ben Hernandez- Jones Lang LaSalle

IT Pioneer: Our Pioneer customers push Okta to blaze new trails. They challenge the status quo and drive great technological advancements for their companies -- and for Okta.

• Jon Fein & Anirudha Kinare- Time Warner
• Sascha Kaltsios- Hannover Re
• Matt Nation- Acxiom
• Eric Anderson- Adobe

Lightning: We support swift changes here at Okta and many of our customers have succeeded in rolling out Okta to hundreds of employees and users in a matter of weeks - or even days. Fast deployments are no easy feat and we celebrate IT’s speed and agility to make a big organizational change.

• Jason Silvera- Informatica, LLC.
• Shawn Carney- Spotify
• Barb Adams- GoDaddy
• Ali Khosravi- Actelion

Okta for Good: Every nonprofit is on a mission to make a difference, Okta connects these teams and the technologies they rely on to help make that happen. While we are proud to enable the important work of our hundreds of nonprofit customers through our social impact initiative, these organizations went above and beyond to use the Okta Identity Cloud to accelerate their mission and deliver lasting impact. All four of these finalists are on a mission to make a difference from granting wishes of children diagnosed with life-threatening medical conditions to tackling issues to alleviate poverty. These nonprofits are changing the world, and we’re proud to help.

• Art delaCruz- Team Rubicon
• Erik Arnold- PATH
• Michael Duggan- Oxfam America
• Jeff Pick- Make-A-Wish Foundation

Help us celebrate these finalists, and all of our customers, by joining us at Oktane17!