Okta 'App of the Week': ADP Disrupting Corporate Payroll with the Cloud

At Okta, we’re fortunate to work with some of the most innovative cloud companies out there— the Okta Application Network has more than 1,000 cloud apps — that are causing massive disruption in their particular industries. Disruption. It’s a trait we share at Okta by offering a fully native cloud alternative to old world IT that’s putting IT back in charge. One of the more popular apps our customers use is ADP, a company that’s making similar waves in corporate payroll—and they’ve been doing it for a long time. They were cloud before there was a cloud.

AllThingsD’s Arik Hesseldahl recently wrote about the company, pointing out that ADP is one of the largest cloud companies nobody’s ever heard of, despite handling more than $1.2 trillion in employee payments for 33 million people last year. Beyond the company’s logo on pay stubs, nobody really knows about ADP. And that’s a shame, because the enterprise could learn a lot from ADP’s approach.

Why It’s Cool: ADP generates one in six paychecks in the U.S. (and the company’s market share in Bay Area is 50 percent!). For the past 60 years, the company has been constantly innovating and that is why Forbes recently listed ADP as one of “The World’s Most Innovative Companies,” a ranking of the top 100 “leading-edge corporations deemed most likely to succeed now and in the future.” (Salesforce and Amazon, two of the most prominent, vocal proponents of the cloud’s power to reshape business, checked in at No. 1 and No. 2, respectively.)

Congrats, ADP, on your much-deserved recognition for reshaping a staid industry and for showing others the way to the cloud.