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Strategy Canon

Okta: sourced choices

37 product and go-to-market choices, oldest first. Back to the case study

  1. 2009Product · Initial customer job The founders abandoned their first idea, monitoring the reliability of hosted applications, after executives told them it did not solve their main problem and that identity was becoming one; drawings from early 2009 resemble the later product. OK45
  2. 2009Go_To_Market · Customer discovery and founder selling Kerrest and McKinnon did their own outreach through alumni networks and LinkedIn, set a target of 18 customer conversations a month and treated a signed letter of intent before the product existed as the test of real interest. OK7
  3. 2010Product · Entry product The first product let employees sign into cloud applications such as Salesforce, Box and Workday with the Windows (Active Directory) password they already used. OK24
  4. 2010Product · Integrations Early connectors were built on demand: the team asked each prospective customer which applications it ran and promised to build those integrations, sometimes by the next day. OK53
  5. 2010Go_To_Market · Pricing at entry Okta charged from the first customer; Xactly's first order was $400, and McKinnon said charging filtered out prospects who were not serious. OK53
  6. 2010Go_To_Market · Early target After missing revenue targets with about 30 staff, McKinnon narrowed the goal to getting five customers live regardless of price; the company had five by year end and about fifty within months. OK2
  7. 2010-07-13Go_To_Market · Target segment The typical early customer had fewer than 2,000 employees. OK21
  8. 2011Go_To_Market · Sales performance In 2011 bookings came in far below the plan shown to Series B investors (McKinnon recalls about $100,000 against $250,000 in one account and $40,000 against $300,000 in another). OK24
  9. 2011-01Product · Architecture and deployment The service launched publicly in January 2011 as a hosted identity and directory service: IT kept one central directory and replicated it to cloud applications, with control over users and apps in the cloud and behind the firewall. OK22
  10. 2011-08-08Go_To_Market · Funding for distribution Okta raised a $16.5 million Series B from Greylock, Khosla, Andreessen Horowitz and Floodgate for sales, marketing and distribution; Workday co-founder Aneel Bhusri joined the board. OK22
  11. 2011-12-15Product · Self-service catalog Okta added a self-service catalog that let IT publish a custom app list and gave end users single sign-on to about 1,200 cloud and web applications. OK23
  12. 2012Go_To_Market · Segment shift Having copied Salesforce's approach of selling to small companies, Okta turned to large enterprises, because identity problems grow with the number of users. OK24
  13. 2016-03-16Go_To_Market · Competitive selling McKinnon publicly claimed Okta beat Microsoft in eight of ten head-to-head deals despite Microsoft's bundling; Microsoft first refused Okta a sponsorship slot at its event, then reversed. OK25
  14. 2016-10-31Product · Product breadth By the IPO the Okta Identity Cloud comprised six products on one platform: Universal Directory, Single Sign-On, Adaptive Multi-Factor Authentication, Lifecycle Management (provisioning), Mobility Management and API Access Management. OK1
  15. 2016-10-31Product · Integrations The Okta Application Network held more than 5,000 integrations with cloud, mobile and web applications. OK1
  16. 2016-10-31Go_To_Market · Positioning The IPO filing positioned Okta as 'the leading independent provider of identity for the enterprise' whose platform 'is independent and neutral' across applications, devices and clouds, while naming AWS, Box, Google Cloud, Microsoft, NetSuite, SAP, ServiceNow and Workday as partners. OK1
  17. 2017-04-07Go_To_Market · Capital markets Okta listed on Nasdaq on April 7, 2017, at a market value of about $2.1 billion. OK13
  18. 2018-01-31Go_To_Market · Sales organization and channels Okta sold through inside and field sales supported by sales engineers, a security team and cloud architects, and indirectly through system integrators, VARs and government VARs, under a stated land-and-expand model of adding users and products within the initial contract term. OK38
  19. 2018-12-05Go_To_Market · Account expansion Management reported that the US Department of State, which first bought Okta to authenticate more than 100,000 external industry partners, would expand it to its whole workforce. OK39
  20. 2019Go_To_Market · Sales motion Okta built a large, aggressive enterprise sales force to penetrate larger accounts and sold on security and uptime rather than feature breadth. OK3
  21. 2020Product · Customer identity About three or four years into selling, customers such as a pharmaceutical company began using Okta to log in their own customers; by about 2020 this was roughly 24% of revenue. OK24
  22. 2020-04-15Product · Integration infrastructure McKinnon described building a metadata-driven integration infrastructure early, because standards such as SAML covered simple login but not directory replication, and many applications did not follow them. OK4
  23. 2021-01-31Product · Integrations The network exceeded 7,000 integrations, and customers' developers could build their own integrations for proprietary systems. OK29
  24. 2021-03-03Go_To_Market · Acquisition as route to developers Okta agreed to buy Auth0 for about $6.5 billion in stock to reach developers building customer-facing applications, keeping Auth0 as an independent unit. OK18
  25. 2021-05-03Product · Acquisition Okta closed its $6.5 billion acquisition of Auth0, a developer-centric customer identity platform, and kept it as a separate product line. OK20
  26. 2022-02Go_To_Market · Content marketing Okta publishes the annual Businesses at Work report from anonymized OIN data, showing which applications its 14,000-plus customers deploy alongside Microsoft 365. OK27
  27. 2022-04-20Product · Reliability and control After the January 2022 Sitel compromise Okta ended the Sitel relationship, took direct management of third-party devices that reach support tools and applied Zero Trust requirements to sub-processors. OK43
  28. 2022-11-10Go_To_Market · Sales integration (reversed) Okta merged the Auth0 and Okta sales forces soon after the deal; McKinnon later said it moved too fast and the larger sales force outran lead generation. OK8
  29. 2024-02-27Product · Security reset Okta paused new product development for 90 days to focus on security, bound sessions to IP addresses, required MFA for admin roles and assigned more than 400 engineers to security work. OK9
  30. 2024-02-28Go_To_Market · Trust repair Okta launched the Okta Secure Identity Commitment on its Q4 FY2024 call, with a $50 million, five-year pledge to outside security initiatives (per OK9). OK31
  31. 2026-01-31Product · Product lines Okta sells two platforms: the Okta Platform for workforce identity (employees, contractors, partners and non-human identities) and the developer-centric Auth0 Platform for customer-facing applications; Okta for AI Agents was in early access. OK11
  32. 2026-01-31Go_To_Market · Sales specialization At the start of fiscal 2026 Okta re-split its go-to-market into Okta sellers for IT and security buyers and Auth0 sellers for developers, alongside free trials, free plans and paid developer plans. OK11
  33. 2026-08-26Product · Acquisition Okta completed the acquisition of Permiso to add behavioral detection for identities, including AI agents. OK51
  34. 2026-08-26Go_To_Market · Channel Channel partners were engaged in all of Okta's top 20 deals in Q2 FY2027, and the largest deal was partner-sourced. OK51
  35. 2026-09-24Product · Integration submission Independent software vendors build integrations in a free Integrator org and submit them through the OIN Wizard; Okta's OIN team reviews and tests each one before publishing it to customers. OK49
  36. 2026-09-24Product · Microsoft coexistence Okta packages features aimed at Microsoft shops: SSO from Active Directory, real-time directory sync, Office 365 deployment tooling and merging identities across several Active Directory domains without AD trusts. OK35
  37. 2026-09-24Go_To_Market · Account expansion Flex first used Okta Customer Identity to automate supplier-portal access for thousands of suppliers, then deployed Workforce Identity to about 200,000 employees across Office 365, Box, Workday and factory systems. OK41