Customers + Partners

We announced some of our latest customers today, including AppDynamics, Drobo, Farm Credit Services of Mid-America, Rypple, and WhitePages. And we can’t help but brag – but our customers are some of the most innovative companies on the market today. Drobo is the maker of award-winning storage products that combine data protection, affordable…

6. SaaS billing is heating up and Zuora is flying high On Thursday evening I attended a party hosted by Zuora, a leading SaaS billing company run by former SFDC colleagues of mine. I had a chance to catch up with my friends Tien Tzuo (CEO), Jeff Yoshimura (Head of Marketing & BD) and Richard Terry-Lloyd (VP Sales) at the event. Tien was…

I spent a few days last week in Las Vegas at Salesforce.com’s (SFDC) sales kickoff (SKO) for the upcoming year. SFDC’s fiscal calendar ends January 31st, so after a couple days to recharge the batteries, reorganize some management groups and redesign sales territories the sales force was gathered to learn about the new plans for FY2012 and to get…

Signing up partners is easy. Building effective partnerships is another story. I have spent the last 20 years working on different software partnering structures. Between HP, BroadVision, Salesforce.com and SuccessFactors, I have learned a lot about what it takes to create a great partnership. I am now working on a new startup with some old…

In taking a moment to gather thoughts as the BigIdeas Conference wraps ups here in Chicago, it’s clear that we had a great show. Two of the themes of the show were “customer success” and “have fun” and the BigMachines folks really delivered on both aspects. First, it’s cool to work with great partners like BigMachines who build products that…

Building Okta over the last 18 months has proven to be an exciting ride. When people ask Todd and me "what has surprised you most", Todd being the wiser one often answers something very simple, profound and true like "everything takes longer than you think." I often tend to offer something more pedestrian (and less profound, but equally true)…

We are very pleased to share that CRN has recently named Okta one of the top 10 solutions delivering new functionality to the Cloud. Long-trusted as one of the premier publications for channel and reseller partners, its outstanding to receive this type of validation from the editors at CRN! With a growing number of accolades for Okta, from both…

Much has been written in the last few years about the macro level changes impacting enterprise software. The phrase Consumerization of IT has been used widely to describe how consumer technologies are penetrating the enterprise (iPhones, Skype, Facebook, Twitter), and how enterprise IT products are changing to provide more consumer-like…