Question for the tech knowledgeable?
I don’t have enough tech savvy to evaluate how significant Okta’s four announcements yesterday were. Can anyone (or more) offer some opinions?
Thanks so much in advance.
Saul
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Most of these are upgrades to their product set. Nothing is a game-changer. Although it does show they continue to execute well and roll out new features, making their products more competitive.
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For Hybrid IT and Customer Identity, Highlights Global Partner Expansion
https://www.okta.com/press-room/press-releases/okta-announce…
This one appears to be an expansion of what integration partners and resellers can offer. There is a new technology that would allow Okta to now manage identity for hosted applications, not just cloud apps. This would be essential to penetrate large traditional enterprises. The language here is abstract, this is the hardest one to decipher.
Impact to business: Medium
Tech cool factor: Totally boring
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Okta Unites User Identity and Device Identity for Customer-Facing Applications Through New Okta Devices SDK
https://www.okta.com/press-room/press-releases/okta-unites-u…
This one is very cool. They released a mobile SDK. A toolkit that will let developers of apps for iOS and Android enable passwordless authentication with biometric capabilities. “Now, developers can leverage the power of Okta Verify to build customized, secure, and seamless login experiences for their customers.”
Impact to business: Small
Tech cool factor: Bad ass!
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Okta Launches Customer Identity Workflows, Bringing No-Code Identity Automation to Digital Initiatives
https://www.okta.com/press-room/press-releases/okta-launches…
This announcement is the release of a no-code way to set up Okta. It would be used by a marketing team to set up Okta for a consumer-facing website or app. It means that marketing doesn’t have to wait for IT or engineering to help them. “Okta Customer Identity Workflows enables enterprises to make identity actions completely programmable without having to write code. New connectors for Marketo, OneTrust, and Salesforce are the first of many Workflow Connectors explicitly designed to speed and simplify complex identity processes across customer journeys.”
Impact to business: Small
Tech cool factor: Meh
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Okta Announces New Advanced Server Access Capabilities to Accelerate Secure Cloud Infrastructure Development for Digital Initiatives
https://www.okta.com/press-room/press-releases/okta-announce…
This one is a bit out of my area of expertise. I read it as an upgrade to Okta’s back-end developer tools that engineers use when building other applications. “Ultimately, Okta Advanced Server Access makes it faster and more secure to build from anywhere with identity and access management at the heart of infrastructure access.” My best guess: If Okta is central to a consumer application, the engineers need tools to help manage that across all the servers and other tools that they are used.
Here is the example they provide:
"Educators and students all over the world depend on McGraw Hill’s learning solutions for their educational experiences,” said Joe Turbett, Chief Enterprise Architect, McGraw Hill. “Education has never been more dependent on technology than it is today, and we are delivering exceptional digital products to meet this moment. Okta Advanced Server Access enables us to deliver secure access to thousands of servers from anywhere on the globe, meeting the rising demand for our solutions, all while remaining compliant.”
Maybe someone else can explain this one better?
Impact to business: Small
Tech cool factor: ???
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“Okta Customer Identity Workflows enables enterprises to make identity actions completely programmable without having to write code. New connectors for Marketo, OneTrust, and Salesforce are the first of many Workflow Connectors explicitly designed to speed and simplify complex identity processes across customer journeys.”
As a non techie I am interested in the fact that you minimized this development. Reading it I was reminded of the day that the GUI was created. It completely changed the scope of access to the web for non -techs. My reaction was was a whole new population of users now had easier access to OKTA services. Apparently not.
“Okta Customer Identity Workflows enables enterprises to make identity actions completely programmable without having to write code. New connectors for Marketo, OneTrust, and Salesforce are the first of many Workflow Connectors explicitly designed to speed and simplify complex identity processes across customer journeys.”
Here again, as a non-tech I read the example as an illustration of a major expansion of opportunities for distributing multiuser services around the globe. It seemed to me that the example spoke for itself. If your business required multiple connections involving continuous usage by a large number of customers throught the world then this presented a faster and better way to go. And provided the identification and security safeguards necessary for the enterprise. In other words a particular use case for the kind of large scale undertaking with large complex interactions exemplified by the McGraw
Hill example.
Did I get it wrong?
cheers
arnie
4 Likes
I haven’t used Okta’s new tools myself, so I am just guessings at this. But my team uses Marketo with Salesforce now.
In my opinion, making implementation easier for marketing teams is great, but I don’t see how it increases the total market for Okta. It just makes implementation easier. Teams were already integrating it. They just needed support. Now they need slightly less. It doesn’t make Okta useful to a wider group of customers or lower costs significantly so that they could penetrate SMBs for example.
The GUI for a computer was only a game-changer when it was applied to low-cost PCs. That is what created a huge market. A GUI on a mainframe will never be useful to the average Joe.
Hope that helps.
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Hi Draj,
Re: “codeless” / “no-code” / graphical workflows
"…I am interested in the fact that you minimized this development. Reading it I was reminded of the day that the GUI was created. It completely changed the scope of access to the web for non -techs. My reaction was was a whole new population of users now had easier access to OKTA services. Apparently not. "
This stuff isn’t new. It is just another way of setting up workflow automation where the completion of one process triggers others (think, “when this happens, now do this”). It is a tricky thing because programmers would rather write code, especially as building blocks for more complex workflows. Less technical users may still find it too technical or requires more of a learning curve than expected. There are also complications from a company/business perspective as you need to be able to test and monitor these things, which can be much easier for common coding language than a proprietary GUI that generates some configuration files somewhere. It all depends on where the solution ends up, who it is targeting, how easy it is to use, how much it tries to accomplish.
My point is that tools like this can be a great thing, or a waste of time, depending on the type of users it is trying to target and how it all works in practice.
I don’t have enough tech savvy to evaluate how significant Okta’s four announcements yesterday were. Can anyone (or more) offer some opinions?
Thanks everyone for your kind replies.
Saul
1 Like
I too was interested in Okta’s announcements and appreciated Saul asking the question, and appreciated the responses from board members, not really able on my own to ascertain how Okta’s announcements might affect the business. I personally sold the remainder of my Okta holding earlier this week (and bought DOCU), and of course Okta grew from $223 to $238 throughout the week 
Okta is one of those companies that was really hard for me to sell and I could see myself getting back in at some point in the future: Strong numbers announced a few weeks ago, great management, great market, great products. I just held a conviction that there might be better investments than Okta, for now. I might be wrong, of course.
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"Okta Advanced Server Access enables us to deliver secure access to thousands of servers from anywhere on the globe, meeting the rising demand for our solutions, all while remaining compliant.”
Maybe someone else can explain this one better?
This means that instead of enabling/deploying Okta security services “server-by-server” or “region-by-region”, they have deployed a management server that keeps track of where Okta’s specific services/components are enabled, so that an IT team have one managed deployment event to execute & monitor instead of a deployment event per “region”.
I think.
FC
30+ years in IT, still learning AWS/Azure cloud architecture
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