How We're Connecting Everything - Day 1 Keynote Summary

Today at Oktane18, I shared my belief that identity is one of the greatest challenges and opportunities of our time. The people who work at Okta, as well as many of our customers and partners, feel a sense of great urgency around this challenge. Like every organization in this digital revolution, we are answering the call to move fast — to go beyond — and in our case, to securely connect any person to any technology.

This year, I’m proud that our company is innovating to define a secure passwordless experience for our customers, enabled by our new ThreatInsight feature and replaced by a stronger combination of factors and context. We expect that in short order, most logins to Okta and the apps and services we connect to will be replaced by this technology. We’re also leaving no person behind, with a new public browser extension, PassProtect, that helps everyone choose stronger passwords. We’re building new tools that will make it easier for developers to scale their apps securely with Okta’s new One App. And, we think it is so important that developers build secure identity into their apps, we’re providing it at no cost for organizations who use the ‘Identity by Okta’ branding.

We’re also enabling our customers and partners to take advantage of the growing network effects of Okta’s 5,500+ integrations and 4,350 customers by partnering more broadly and deeply. Noah Wasmer, the General Manager of VMware, and I shared a new strategic partnership between our companies to build a product experience that combines the power of identity and access from the Okta Identity Cloud with the device management capabilities of VMware’s Workspace ONE. Julien Codorniou, the GM of Workplace by Facebook, also shared that Workplace will leverage the Okta Identity Cloud to connect enterprises to their directory services. In both instances, we’re bringing our greatest strengths and capabilities to the table to provide an even better, more valuable experience to our joint customers.

We’re also kicking off Project Onramp, an initiative that will allow IT professionals to try out new apps and services with one click from the Okta admin console. Founding partners include Box, Workplace by Facebook, McAfee, OrgWiki, PagerDuty, RingCentral, Zylo and Zscaler. Finally, we launched Sign In with Okta, a SAML replacement, to make it easier for every app, service and B2B website to adopt the most modern authentication standard — OpenID Connect.

At previous Oktanes, any one of these announcements would have been significant on their own. What makes Oktane18 truly unique is that we’ve hit a turning point as a company, and as an industry. While 2017 marked a major business milestone, 2018 is the year we start to see identity go mainstream. We’re excited for what’s beyond.