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 spot as users access apps and systems 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 login and authenticate. You have probably used their solutions which are integrated with more than 7,000 SaaS apps. Okta has more than 18,000 customers, having penetrated more than 50% of the Fortune 500. With a TAM of $80 billion and $2 billion of annual revenue, there is still room to expand their footprint.
Okta completed the acquisition of Auth0 (https://auth0.com/) in early 2022, which gave them exposure not only to workforce identity solutions, but also to customer identity (think users external to an organization that want to access services like e-commerce, etc). As the number of apps increases, even in the corporate world, the need to simplify access becomes more relevant. Okta periodically releases data on app trends worth following: https://www.okta.com/businesses-at-work/.
The Okta enterprise solutions are not self-serve, but need to be implemented within a customer’s environment. This creates the opportunity for professional services organizations to bring these solutions into 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 not as mature as others we have reviewed. After cleaning the data we arrive at 100 services partners worldwide which overall employ 1.8 million professionals. We know there are professional certification tracks but data on number of certs is not available.
Almost half of the services partners are based in North America with limited international focus outside of developed markets.
As we have seen in other services partner ecosystems, 2/3rds 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. Security is an increasing interest of ours 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 more about security services.