Adoption by the Most Knowledgeable and Demanding Users of SaaS Applications Reinforces Okta’s Market-Leading Position and Deepens Its Partnerships with Key SaaS ISVs
San Francisco, CA – May 31, 2012 – Okta, the leading on-demand identity and access management service, today announced continued customer momentum that includes a growing list of leading enterprise SaaS vendors. Bazaarvoice, DocuSign, Eloqua, Host Analytics, Jive, Lithium, SuccessFactors and Taleo join a group of companies worldwide that rely on Okta to not only secure and manage access to their cloud and on-premises web applications, but also increase employee productivity and reduce IT administrative costs.
The Choice of the Most Knowledgeable and Demanding Cloud Users
Enterprise SaaS vendors are strong believers in, and heavy users of, the cloud – applying a cloud-first approach within their own IT environments. As a result, their internal IT organizations are acutely aware of the challenges associated with securing and managing cloud-based infrastructures. But when it comes to evaluating and selecting the cloud services they use, these IT teams are also the most knowledgeable and demanding buyers. After all, running a cloud service is their business. They are intimately familiar with what is required to develop, deliver and support a highly-available, scalable and secure on-demand service to meet the demands of the enterprise.
These discerning buyers understand the value of a highly reliable service that controls access to their business critical applications. Okta’s zero downtime architecture – which enabled Okta to deliver more than 50 new feature releases while maintaining 99.9 percent availability over the last twelve months – was a critical factor for these discerning buyers. And as SaaS vendors themselves, they also appreciate the fact that Okta’s completion of a rigorous SOC 2 Type II audit puts them in a group that includes less than 1 percent of the overall SaaS vendor population.
“As a provider of an enterprise on-demand service, we see the cost, usability and innovation benefits of the cloud every day. But as heavy cloud users, our IT team and employees have also experienced first-hand the challenge of using multiple cloud apps to power our business, ” said Mike Dinsdale, Chief Financial Officer of DocuSign. “As a fellow SaaS provider that deeply understands the cloud, Okta was the clear choice for us to most efficiently manage the multiple cloud apps we use to power our business. Our experience with Okta has been fantastic – we’ve increased employee productivity while lowering our IT costs, and our deployment of Okta has deepened the collaboration between our two organizations on both the engineering and go-to market fronts.”
Strengthening Partnerships with the Market-Leading SaaS ISVs
For its many enterprise customers, Okta provides comprehensive knowledge of how to best manage authentication and user management across the cloud application landscape. Okta has developed relationships with more than 1,500 of these applications, which are pre-integrated in the Okta Application Network.
When Okta also adds these cloud independent software vendors (ISVs) as customers, relationships between the two companies become stronger and collaboration deepens. Together they can develop and expose within Okta new functionality for the cloud applications to improve security and manageability. In addition, with deeper relationships across their organizations, Okta and their ISV partners are able to quickly and seamlessly resolve any service issues that arise due to the integrations between the two companies – so customers never have to endure endless finger pointing between vendors.
“Strong relationships with the industry’s leading SaaS vendors are absolutely critical to Okta’s long-term success. These SaaS providers and their cloud-first IT environments are constantly pushing the Okta platform to ensure it can manage and secure these new IT environments,” said Todd McKinnon, CEO of Okta. “The technical integrations that we maintain with our ISV partners are core to the value that we provide our joint customers. Okta’s commitment to our customers is that access to all of their cloud applications just works – independent of which application they are using – and deep relationships with these vendors are critical to keeping that commitment.”
Customer Momentum Across Verticals
In addition to the momentum with enterprise SaaS vendors, Okta has also made significant traction across verticals. In the first half of 2012 other new customer additions included Groupon, Inc., HomeAway, NetScout Systems, ServiceSource Corporation, Broadsoft, The Climate Corporation and Citizen Schools.
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