#LifeAtOkta

Dreamforce is a landmark event every year. It’s certainly the year’s most important cloud event – and, beyond that – it’s just a scene. The Red Hot Chili Peppers, after all, will kick off the conference’s opening day. A technology conference and one of the biggest names in music? Only at Dreamforce… Growing Cloud Acceptance Looking back, it’s been…

In a post this morning on Fast Company, I reflect on the management lessons I've learned since leaving salesforce.com to start Okta. Building and running a successful company, as a CEO, takes a completely different set of skills than running an engineering team. Have a look, and be sure to head over to Fast Company to read the full article: Before…

The RSA Conference, the largest IT security show of the year, ended two weeks ago, but the conversations that took place are still reverberating. Chris Preimesberger, editor at eWeek, has identified a few of the major themes that are likely to impact IT departments in 2012: Web application firewalls. With the number of cyber data hacks rising,…

As enterprises today move more aggressively to the cloud — and as their employees increasingly want to use anything but their desktop (laptops, tablet, smartphones) to access applications — IT organizations have to find new ways to manage identity and access across mobile devices and applications that are no longer within their four walls. But for…

Last week, I welcomed Adam Aarons and Hector Aguilar to the Okta team and offered some thoughts, culled from my time as an engineer, on what constitutes a great engineering team. It was meant as a bit of advice (for what it was worth), to Hector, our new VP of engineering – because admittedly, I’m an engineer at heart. I ran engineering at…

With Adam Aarons (SVP of worldwide sales) and Hector Aguilar (VP of engineering) joining the Okta team, I thought I’d reflect on what makes a great engineering team — and how that philosophy also applies to building a rockstar sales team. I’ll get into sales next week, but first here are some thoughts on what makes a high performing engineering…

Well, we might not have won a Crunchie on Tuesday night — congrats to Dropbox, which cleaned up, winning best cloud service and best overall startup — but we’re not hanging our heads. We were thrilled to be one of six finalists in a stacked bracket, and we’re even more thrilled that enterprise software’s gone mainstream, maybe even sexy…

This morning, we announced the results of our business over the past year. We have some incredible momentum. Reflecting on the numbers, it sunk in just how much we’ve accomplished since launching in January 2011. Our growth proves the hypothesis I set out with after leaving salesforce.com to start Okta: Businesses are catching on to the power and…

We’re thrilled to be named one of six finalists for the Crunchies Awards in the “Best Cloud Service” category. It’s no doubt a tough bracket, full of lots of great companies doing great things in the cloud, from Box and Dropbox to Asana, CloudFlare and Twilio. We’ve no doubt got our work cut out for us. Then again, what could be more important to…

The way we work at home is changing. Back in the day (way back), a typical work day would look something like this: You’d come in to the office, fire up your desktop computer, go get some coffee while you waited the 5 minutes it took for your machine to boot up, sign on to your network, launch some software running on the company’s network, do…