Okta Report and ZS Takeaway

Investment Analysis Clubs Saul’s Investing Discussions
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This is my first post, and I am still getting my sea legs with this board, but I thought the following report from Okta was very interesting: https://www.okta.com/sites/default/files/2022-01/Businesses-…

There are a lot of takeaways from many companies frequently discussed on the Board, and there may be some nuggets others glean from the information that could be useful. I thought the article lent some credence to the ZM bull case (I realize no longer held by many) about the overall growth, the number of customers with Office365 who are increasingly moving to Zoom, and the growth in AMEA.

The main reason for my post, however, was some concerns I had with Zscaler in on Page 36. It shows “Most Popular Remote Access Solutions.” While Zsclaer has grown nicely, it dramatically pales in comparison to PaloAlto, Cisco, and AWS Client, each of which went parabolic during COVID. Now I realize that ZS isn’t just VPN or traditional remote access, but it was something that gave me pause at least, and with Cloudflare creeping into the space, gives me some additional caution. Not to say that I am selling out, but that it was an interesting data point I found interesting and would be curious on others’ thoughts.

Also, I’ve read the rules and believe that this complies with all of them, and that others will find at least the Okta report helpful, but genuinely apologize if not.

Best!

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First, thank you for posting the report. This type of information is what makes this board great and it is really valuable contribution.

It is apparent that Okta probably published this from statistics of what companies put in their Okta SSO dashboard. Personally I would take this report with a grain of salt because not all apps provided Okta SSO like Zoom for all price tiers. Two reasons:

1 There are some apps that you need to pay a lot more in order to get Okta SSO. We recently purchased one where the base version ($15/mo per seat) does not have Okta support but the enterprise ($99/mo per seat) has - or I should say “will have eventually.” Their functionally the same for actual users. You can totally just buy the base version and get as much work done.

2 company doesn’t need to put everything behind Okta - this is true for most Microsoft apps. They already have Microsoft SSO that integrates well everywhere. I would say Cloudflare is another because only a handful of people needs a login (networking team) most of the time.

So IMO Okta’s statistics is a lagging indicator because it depends on whether the app supports it or not.

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From our board’s holdings it also looked promising for:
Monday.com
ZScaler
Atlassian
MongoDB
Datadog
as well as the cloud operators.

Ant

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