Company + Product

Company + Product

Lessons on Building a Great Engineering Team (and Why Rockstar Sales Teams Aren’t All That Different)

With Adam Aarons (SVP of worldwide sales) and Hector Aguilar (VP of engineering) joining the Okta team, I thought I’d reflect on what makes a great engineering team — and how that philosophy also applies to building a rockstar sales team. I’ll get into sales next week, but first here are some thoughts on what makes a high performing engineering…

IT Spending Growth & Growing Federal IT Security Concerns

Here’s a roundup of some of last week’s most interesting cloud computing news. IT Spending Up in 2012 IDC announced today their 2012 IT growth estimates. ZDNet’s Larry Dignan highlighted a few of the research firm’s key growth estimates in 2012: Hardware and software spending to increase 6 percent. IT services spending will grow at a 4 percent…

Enterprise Software: The New Cool Kids in Tech

Well, we might not have won a Crunchie on Tuesday night — congrats to Dropbox, which cleaned up, winning best cloud service and best overall startup — but we’re not hanging our heads. We were thrilled to be one of six finalists in a stacked bracket, and we’re even more thrilled that enterprise software’s gone mainstream, maybe even sexy…

What a Year It’s Been!

This morning, we announced the results of our business over the past year. We have some incredible momentum. Reflecting on the numbers, it sunk in just how much we’ve accomplished since launching in January 2011. Our growth proves the hypothesis I set out with after leaving salesforce.com to start Okta: Businesses are catching on to the power and…

Perfectly Secure? Quantum Physics and the Cloud

Security remains a critical issue in the cloud. Last week, the U.S. government released its top seven tips for secure cloud adoption while an international team of scientists debuted perfectly secure cloud computing … using quantum physics. NIST Provides Concise Cloud Adoption Guide The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)…

Securely Scaling the Cloud @LinkedIn

Customer success is our most important value at Okta, which is why I am very excited today to talk more about the great relationship we have developed with Mike Jennings and his IT team over at LinkedIn. And the funny thing is it all started with the LinkedIn service – really. We were still early on in the pipeline building and customer…

Password Sharing: One Trend That Has No Place at Work

From SOPA to Megaupload, there was a lot going on in Internet news last week. Below we’d like to highlight a few of the stories that resonated with us as enterprise cloud users. The iPad: Ushering in Consumer IT Last week Sarah Lacy, former senior editor at TechCrunch, launched the startup news site PandoDaily. In one of the first posts on the…

The Rise of the Cloud CIO – A Silver Lining for IT and the Business

“The cloud will change IT as nothing before it has. It may end up removing the last vestiges of the captive IT organization that "owns" its enterprise as surely as the enterprise owns IT. CIOs are right to start addressing it now.” – The Why of Cloud, Richard Hunter, Gartner Inc., December 2011 The Rise of the Cloud For over a decade now I have…

Zappos Security Breach Affects Millions; Are Passwords Necessary?

More on Password Debate In a piece for Wired, Robert McMillan lays out our long, conflicted relationship with the password. What started as an easy solution to access our lives online has spiraled out of control. We are now forced to remember more passwords than ever, many containing nonsense symbols and a mix of capital letters and numerals. What…

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