As technology percolates all areas of our work and personal lives and enterprise cloud adoption continues, the proliferation of apps posts security access concerns that need to be addressed. Authentication is a key vulnerability as users access apps and systems that interoperate programmatically. Enter Okta, a leader in identity and access management (IAM).
Okta is a publicly traded enterprise security company whose solutions help users and systems log in and authenticate. You have probably used their solutions, which are integrated with over 7,000 SaaS apps. Okta has over 18,000 customers and has penetrated over 50% of the Fortune 500. With a TAM of $80 billion and $2 billion annual revenue, there is still room to expand its footprint.
Okta completed the acquisition of Auth0 (https://auth0.com/) in early 2022, which exposed them to workforce identity solutions and customer identity (think users external to an organization who want to access services like e-commerce, etc.). As the number of apps increases, the need to simplify access becomes more relevant, even in the corporate world. Okta periodically releases data on app trends that are worth following: https://www.okta.com/businesses-at-work/.
The Okta enterprise solutions are not self-serve but must be implemented within a customer’s environment. This allows professional services organizations to bring these solutions to their customers. Partnering with Okta starts to make sense, similar to other ISV partner ecosystems that help drive adoption for the ISV platform.
The Okta services partner ecosystem is less mature than the others we have reviewed. After cleaning the data, we arrived at 100 service partners worldwide, which employ 1.8 million professionals overall. We know there are professional certification tracks, but data on the number of certifications is unavailable.
Almost half of the service partners are based in North America, and they have a limited international focus outside developed markets.
As seen in other services partner ecosystems, two-thirds of the partners are boutique / smaller-scale development and consulting organizations with less than 500 employees.
At Alten Capital we invest in business services and technology services companies. We are increasingly interested in security, and we believe leveraging an ISV ecosystem is an appropriate way to scale professional services and consulting operations. Please reach out to us to discuss security services more.