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Consumerizing the Okta User Experience, Part I
August 27th, 2010 by Brian | Comments Off

Part I: Why Enterprise Software Has Such a Bad Rep

We are all consumers.  The experience we have with products in our personal lives helps set expectations for any product that we interact with – the enterprise software we use at work included.  In the past, that software was infamous for being complicated and costly, and the user experience for those enterprise apps left much to be desired.

In this two part post I am going to talk about how massive improvements in consumer software products and online services (part of the “consumerization of IT” trend that Eric referred to) has affected significant change in enterprise software user experience broadly and how we are pushing that even further here at Okta.

In this first post I want to reflect back on how the enterprise user experience (UX) ended up with such a bad reputation.

I started my professional career as an application developer at PeopleSoft in 2000 so I have some insights into why the experience was not that great.  I should mention that PeopleSoft was actually known for having a pretty good UX relative to their competitors at the time. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Blog, Engineering & Technology, Product & Market

Okta Named Top 10 Cloud Startup
August 26th, 2010 by Andrew | Comments Off

The fine folks over at SearchCloudComputing named Okta as one of their top 10 cloud computing startups this morning.  We’re proud and flattered to be included with such a powerful group of new technology companies that are clearly poised to disrupt.  Everyday we’re getting great feedback from our customers and its incredibly exciting to see some of the journalists/analysts that we respect most are starting to recognize the tremendous progress our team has made.

Posted in Company, Product & Market

Marketing at Scale
August 4th, 2010 by Eric | Comments Off

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 capabilities and experiences (Splunk, Zendesk, Solarwinds, Spiceworks).

Equally important, but less broadly discussed, is the impact this trend is having on the business models of companies that are building large, successful franchises around this new class of IT products. Sometimes referred to as Enterprise 2.0 companies – the successful ones go beyond just delivering products or free trials with a consumer level ease of use. They also embrace the operational, marketing, and sales strategies and tactics necessary to build a high volume, low cost business.

While all aspects of an Enterprise 2.0 company have undergone radical change, the one that has changed most dramatically and significantly increased its importance to the success of the business is marketing.

At Okta we think about several core tenets which will enable us to build a successful Enterprise 2.0 company (they are so core that they are strongly reflected in our company values) , and marketing plays a critical role in delivering on every one of them. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Blog, Product & Market, Sales & Customers

Powder in the keg
July 12th, 2010 by Todd | Comments Off

Back in February of this year, we closed our Series A round of financing. We haven’t announced it until now – we’ve been too focused on building our product, our team and making our customers successful. Now that enough people are asking we wanted to communicate more broadly about the investment, our backers and how we’re putting those funds to use to execute on our vision.

We raised $10 Million in our Series A financing round, which was led by Andreessen Horowitz. Ben Horowitz joined our Board of Directors. Including our seed round of funding, we’ve raised a total of $11 Million to fuel our growth. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Blog, Company

How covered is your cloud?
July 1st, 2010 by Todd | Comments Off

At Okta we’re very bullish on the cloud. Our name literally means cloud cover.

At a high level, we believe that cloud computing, and applications and systems delivered as services are a fundamentally better way to build corporate IT. They will make companies run more effectively and efficiently and make them more competitive. Rolling it all up, they will make our economy stronger and the world a better place.

But there are some fundamental services missing before companies can truly build Cloud Area Networks™ and replace their legacy “Local Area Networks”. At Okta, we’re building those services.

We’re thrilled about the opportunity that we have in front of us. This is the biggest transition in corporate IT in decades. The cloud brings more innovation, better ways for companies to utilize IT, more accountability and transparency and most of all an environment where people are directly connected with the right information that they need to do their jobs.

If your company is making the transition to the cloud, contact us so that we can help.

If you are looking to join a talented team building the next generation of corporate IT, we’d love to have you join us.

Posted in Blog, Company

Value in the values
June 15th, 2010 by Todd | Comments Off

Company values matter. I mean really matter. As in billions of dollars and creating new industries. Most people say they matter, but I’m not sure everyone really believes that values are transformational in their significance.

I learned this first hand. My first job after college was at PeopleSoft. PeopleSoft had a strong core value around their employees.  This was driven directly from the top. It was clearly a top priority from Dave Duffield. He had dedicated people in the organization to drive this day-to-day. Company all-hands meetings were centered around employees — championing their success, their uniqueness and basically thanking them for their dedication to the company. There were the free bagels and drinks (before it became de rigueur in Silicon Valley), funny names for things like “PeoplePeople” (PeopleSoft employee) and PeopleSoft jerseys for each employee with their employee number on it. Mine was 1396. More than one time I heard it referred to as “a Cult”. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Blog, Company

Building your house on a rock
June 1st, 2010 by Todd | Comments Off

Every great technology company starts with a great product. When you first start the hard work of turning your vision into living, breathing code, you have critical decisions to make about your foundation. It is critical to “build your house on a rock”. In years past the decisions were desktop or web app? Oracle or SQL Server? Unix or NT? Now the decisions have become Ruby or Java? Amazon or Rackspace? Single tenant hosted or multi tenant?

Part of you knows you’ll have time to rework and undo the early choices. In fact this is unavoidable and you just want to move forward. But part of you also knows some of the decisions will be with you for years and years. You know this from your previous products and jobs — the ones with the code that was “just that way because it used to have to run on HP UX” or “because Sybase didn’t support row-level locking”. You know that the early decisions can make or break the product and the company. You struggle to balance the pressure to move fast and get something working, with the time that you think you need to make the right decisions.

Two years ago when we started building Okta, we faced this situation. In this post I’ll talk about the choices we made, the reasons behind them and the lessons learned now that we’ve been running for awhile. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Blog, Engineering & Technology

Are you “agile”?
May 15th, 2010 by Todd | Comments Off

I’ve interviewed over 300 folks in the last 2 years while building the Okta team. Most have been product development folks. One topic that often comes up is Agile development. As in “do you guys do Agile?”, or “at company xyz we exclusively practiced Agile”.

Few terms in interview land are more overloaded than “Agile”.

Whenever a candidate has “Agile” on their resume or speaks about it in the interview, I always ask them, “What do you mean by Agile?” I’ve heard some pretty interesting answers: Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Blog, Engineering & Technology