SaaS Companies that Know Enterprise Cloud Choose Okta

This morning, we announced some exciting company momentum — specifically around our rapidly growing customer base. Our customers (100+ and growing!) are diverse, coming from all industries, sizes and varying levels of cloud adoption. However, one very strategic trend we’ve seen is the growing number of enterprise class SaaS providers that are going with Okta.

It’s no surprise that companies like Bazaarvoice, DocuSign, Eloqua, Host Analytics, Jive, Lithium, SuccessFactors and Taleo are heavy users of the cloud and that they have experienced first-hand the challenges associated with securing and managing their cloud-based IT infrastructures. It’s also, frankly, not a big surprise that they chose a cloud solution to address these challenges, but what is interesting is what kind of cloud solution they chose.

These companies are probably the most knowledgeable and demanding buyers we see when it comes to picking a solution like Okta’s. 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 — and expect nothing less from their cloud vendors.

They understand the value of having a highly reliable service that controls access to their business critical SaaS applications. Our zero downtime architecture, which enabled us to deliver more than 50 new feature releases while maintaining 99.9 percent availability during the last 12 months, was key to the IT leaders at these companies.

Even though they are heavily “in the cloud,” these companies also rely on Active Directory as the corporate directory behind their firewall and have the same challenge as every other enterprise using AD that needs to connect it with their cloud applications. The fact that Okta’s integration with AD is inherently highly available and can scale easily across a multi-domain, geographically distributed AD infrastructure was also critical. It’s one thing for Okta to run a highly available service, but we also need to ensure that the connection from our service to our customers’ on premises infrastructure is also highly available.

And finally, Okta’s completion of the rigorous SOC 2 Type II audit is extremely important to our SaaS customers. As SaaS vendors, these companies have regulatory and compliance commitments to their customers, and know the value of Okta’s compliance. Okta’s SOC 2 Type II audit completion puts us in a group that includes less than 1 percent of the overall SaaS vendor population, proving to our SaaS customers that we have the operational, security and privacy controls in place to protect both them and their customers.

The other very important effect of Okta adding more enterprise SaaS companies as customers is that it has an immediate and real impact on both the value and level of service that we can deliver to our joint customers.

When we add these cloud ISVs as customers, relationships between the two companies become stronger and collaboration deepens. We work more closely together to integrate their application deeply into Okta, making it easier to secure and manage from Okta. In addition, with deeper relationships across our organizations, we are able to quickly and seamlessly resolve any service issues that arise due to the integrations between our two solutions.

Now, of course, not all enterprises today are using cloud as aggressively as these SaaS vendors, but the SaaS applications that they are using are business critical. Any solution they pick to manage and secure their cloud applications needs to be secure, reliable and well integrated to their existing on premises infrastructure — just like Okta is for these SaaS vendors.

As a result, our customer momentum hasn’t been only with SaaS vendors. Companies across all verticals, sizes and stages of cloud adoption are choosing Okta. Groupon, Inc.; HomeAway; NetScout Systems; ServiceSource Corporation; Broadsoft; The Climate Corporation; and Citizen Schools are just a few examples of other customers that are new to Okta in 2012.

Customer success is our number one company value at Okta. So whether a company has a cloud-first IT environment or is deploying their first cloud application, onboarding them as a customer gets us all super excited, and incredibly motivated to continue to work hard, innovate and deliver the service that will make their cloud adoption a business success.