Okta Recognized by Leading Industry Analyst Firm as a "Cool Vendor" in Cloud Services Brokerage
SAN FRANCISCO — May 12, 2011 — Today, Okta, the leading on-demand identity and access management service, announced significant growth since its January launch, closing a number of new customer subscriptions and partnerships, as well as adding hundreds of applications to the Okta Application Network. Additionally, the company has been included in Gartner’s ‘Cool Vendors in Cloud Services Brokerage’ report, authored by Benoit J. Lheureux and Daryl C. Plummer, released in late April 2011.
Okta’s leading on-demand identity and access management service enables enterprises to accelerate the secure adoption of their web-based applications, both in the cloud and behind the firewall. Okta delivers a complete solution addressing the needs of IT, end users, and business leaders. The Okta Application Network includes hundreds of pre-integrated business and consumer applications.
In the first quarter of this year, Okta has signed a number of new customers across a wide range of industries, including T.D.Williamson, Inc., The Karis Group, Pesticide Action Network and Genomic Health. Customers using Okta have already reported increased user productivity, improved security, reduced administrative costs and improved security associated with application access. Key business drivers for enterprise adoption in 2011 include lowering the escalating Help Desk costs for web application management, reduction in IT resources spent on repetitive user management activities, and mitigation of security risks due to the lack of auditable de-provisioning reporting.
Okta has also signed 14 new independent software vendor and cloud systems integration partnerships since January, including Model Metrics, CloudTrigger, and Coupa, further building out its network and driving customer value through increased user adoption and deep integration in the cloud. Additionally, the company has added over 500 new applications to the Okta Application Network in the past five months, including Ceridien, Halogen, Microsoft Business Productivity Online Services, and Netsuite.
In line with this rapid growth, Okta has received significant recognition of its innovations within cloud services. Recently, Okta was named in Gartner’s April 2011 “Cool Vendors in Cloud Services Brokerage” report. Okta was one of only five companies listed in the Gartner report that highlights interesting and innovative vendors, products and services that help IT deliver and companies consume cloud services.
The Gartner report states: “Consuming and integrating programmatic cloud services — such as software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), cloud storage and business information services — requires substantial technology, skills and resources. This is because it is necessary to understand and master things such as cloud APIs, integration, security and governance, and then to apply these skills to implement and manage cloud projects over time. While many companies are willing to and capable of applying the resources necessary to unilaterally aggregate and consume cloud services, others are not. This has created a new role for various IT services providers — cloud services brokerage (CSB) — in which IT providers function as intermediaries between providers of cloud services and the companies that consume them.”
“Our growth in these few short months shows that companies are realizing the benefits our solution offers right off the bat — both IT departments for security and control needs around business critical cloud applications and end users in terms of simplicity and ease of use,” said Todd McKinnon, CEO, Okta. “Our innovation is empowering our customers to manage their entire cloud services network and accelerate and ease their adoption of cloud and web-based applications. We’re continuing to build out the Okta Application Network to support our rapidly growing customer base and working with a large range of ISVs to make sure the needs of all our users are met in the coming months and years.”
About Gartner's Cool Vendors Selection Process
Gartner's listing does not constitute an exhaustive list of vendors in any given technology area, but rather is designed to highlight interesting, new and innovative vendors, products and services. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness of a particular purpose.
Gartner defines a cool vendor as a company that offers technologies or solutions that are: Innovative, enable users to do things they couldn't do before; Impactful, have, or will have, business impact (not just technology for the sake of technology); Intriguing, have caught Gartner's interest or curiosity in approximately the past six months.
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