Company adds New Customers including Drobo and WhitePages and Taps SuccessFactors Sales Executive to Capitalize on Overwhelming Demand
SAN FRANCISCO – March 30, 2011 – Okta, the leading on-demand identity and access management service, today announced the addition of several new customers, including AppDynamics, Drobo, Farm Credit Services of Mid-America, Rypple, and WhitePages. Okta also announced the appointment of Perry Germain as Vice President of Sales. Germain brings more than 15 years of high technology and SaaS experience to the company, most recently from SuccessFactors, and will lead the company’s sales efforts.
“The market demand this year has outpaced our initial expectations, and we are thrilled to have the opportunity to work with such great companies,” said Todd McKinnon, CEO, Okta. “With this increase in demand, we needed a senior executive who really understands the needs of small and midmarket customers and how to help them address the security and management challenges they face when deploying their cloud applications. I am very pleased to have Perry join the team and look forward to his leadership as we accelerate our sales strategy.”
WhitePages, the leading provider of contact information for people and businesses on the Internet and mobile phones, and Drobo, Inc., the maker of award-winning storage products that combine data protection, affordable capacity and ease-of-use, are just two of the recent customers added to the Okta service. Drobo uses Okta to increase security for end-users who access more than a dozen business critical cloud applications. Drobo’s IT group leverages Okta to report on user activity and to analyze application usage and seat utilization. WhitePages uses Okta to accelerate the adoption of their cloud applications across the enterprise, and to automate user provisioning for new cloud applications. By centralizing management of its thirteen cloud applications with Okta, they have also been able to reduce development and IT administration costs.
“With Okta, our SaaS applications are now user self-service, which takes our IT team out of the loop almost completely,” says Hernan Alvarez, Senior Director of IT Operations, WhitePages. “Okta enables us to deliver a service that lowers the adoption friction for our end-users, and empowers them to deal directly with their day-to-day applications. Not only are our users happy — our IT department is thrilled as well!”
Building on Okta’s recent customer wins across multiple verticals, including high technology, finance, manufacturing and pharmaceuticals, Germain will drive the company’s sales strategy. He joins Okta from SuccessFactors, the leading provider of cloud-based Business Execution software, with more than 8 million users across multiple industries and geographies. While at SuccessFactors, Germain held a variety of sales leadership positions, including serving as Vice President of Midmarket Sales. In this role, he was responsible for helping build the company’s small and midmarket business, from less than $1M to over $55 million in recurring revenue and over 2,000 clients. During his tenure, he also established key OEM and alliance relationships with companies such as Microsoft and Ceridian.
“The team at Okta has built a critical on-demand service for companies that are moving to the cloud. It has also developed an organization that is focused on customer success, and as a result, is experiencing overwhelming customer demand,” said Germain. “I wanted to join a company that highly values customer success, with a differentiated solution that is addressing real pain points for enterprise customers today. Okta is that company, and I am extremely excited to help lead the next phase of growth and to have the opportunity to build on such a strong foundation.”
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