Company + Product

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…

Every great technology company starts with a great product. When you first start the hard work of turning your vision into living, breathing code, you have critical decisions to make about your foundation. It is critical to “build your house on a rock." In years past the decisions were desktop or web app? Oracle or SQL Server? Unix or NT? Now the…

I've interviewed over 300 folks in the last 2 years while building the Okta team. Most have been product development folks. One topic that often comes up is Agile development. As in "do you guys do Agile?", or "at company xyz we exclusively practiced Agile". Few terms in interview land are more overloaded than "Agile". Whenever a candidate has …