Act Now: Okta Fiscal Year End is January

Your Virtual Bouncer

If you need security from the occasional undesirable intruder in your enterprise and need to convey strength in the way you control access to the information you hold most dear, by restricting access to unwelcomed guests and bouncing them from your cloud, you may very well need to learn more about Okta.

In 2021, we named Okta as the #3 technology supplier to watch - largely based on its growth in the enterprise space as a Single-Sign-On platform. In March 2021, Okta acquired Auth0, and by doing so, moved from a cloud-based identity and access management company that provides single-sign-on access for employees to a variety of cloud services, to an enterprise solution provider that also helps developers build easy, out-of-the-box identity and access management controls with just a couple lines of code, helping customers to securely authenticate the users of their applications. Besides Single-sign-on support, feature sets common in this Identity & Access Management (IAM) application space include Access Control, Multi-Factor Authentication, Password Management and Account Provisioning and De-provisioning to name a few.

Okta’s growth has been fueled by its ability to connect different populations and geographies without the need to set up Active Directory Trusts, modify firewall policies, or invest in more infrastructure to connect them all together.

Okta is currently ranked as the #3 or #4 IAM provider (depending on who you believe), and faces stiff competition from the likes of IBM, RSA, Duo, Oracle, OneLogin, JumpCloud, Ping Identity, CyberArk, and many others, but Microsoft is seemingly its most stiff competition as the Okta solution set offers admin and user-friendly tools that offer broad integration across the entire Microsoft technology stack:

In head-to-head client run-offs, we have found that Ping Identity also stacks up well against Otka.

From its own employees, Okta has a Glassdoor rating of 4.0 out of 5, with a 77% recommend to a friend score, and employees openly criticize the company's growing pains because of its hyper growth. When you filter the ratings for full time software engineers, Okta’s rating drops to 2.3. Further investigation starts to reveal that the chief complaint is that the architecture is quite monolithic and difficult, which makes us wonder if Okta will be able to keep pace with a rapidly changing environment.

Okta’s stock has gone from a high of $291.78 as of Feb 12, 2021 to $176.62, falling by nearly 40% in the last year alone, where its currently trading at its 52-week low. The primary reason for this seems to be that the company is currently not profitable and is not forecasted to become profitable over the next 3 years. Investor patience may be wearing a bit thin as a result. Stock aside, the company still seems to be performing well, expecting a 26.5% increase in revenue for FY 2021.

As mentioned above, Okta’s FYE is January, and given the backdrop of the other information provided herein, it makes this January a particularly great time to claim value if you have a proposal, an agreement, or a renewal on the table.

Pricing

Okta Workforce Identity pricing varies between $2 and $6 per user per month, and $15 per server per month, depending on service. Okta Customer Identity pricing for enterprise editions start at $36k annually and have additional charges depending on the features you need for monthly active users (MAUs) and/or for tokens for machine-to-machine needs. Negotiated discounts can be obtained, depending on the composition of the bill of materials, the term, the volumes, and other specifics. Pricing discounts of more than 90% from the published list pricing are achievable for exceptionally large deployments.

https://www.okta.com/pricing/ 

Okta has enjoyed a significant amount of market acceptance and momentum, capturing more market-share in recent years and now (as a publicly traded company) there are added pressures to continue to grow and perform. Customers are starting to see some added sales pressures from Okta in recent months to add on additional functionality. Because most of the offerings are presented ala carte, this of course increases Okta revenues, but is also seen as somewhat transactional, as customers have not been getting optimized market treatment based on their volumes, product mixes, and terms – unless they have made larger, more strategic purchases up front. As a result, customers who have grown with Okta over time are increasingly ‘out of market’ when looking at their total costs. From an entry cost of $2/user/month, adding functionality can easily push up costs by 10x or more.

In extreme cases, customers that stack add-on user functionality over time and progress transactionally can end up paying $50/user/month, which puts them at the highest end of the bell curve in terms of over-payment on value, and this doesn’t even include all the additional costs for user and device management as well as costs for authentication systems for other protocols.  

How to Save

First step; everyone should benchmark their Okta proposal and/or agreement. With just a few pieces of information, NET(net) can benchmark your deal (in as little as 1 business day) and show you how much you can save.

The Commercial Arrangement

  • Evaluate the bill of materials carefully to build the feature set you need to achieve your goals and review the Okta solutions to determine how much it would cost with a minimal deployment and feature-set.
  • To maximize your discounts, you want to maximize your volume, so you should consider maximizing your existing user and other counts (servers, flows, et al).
  • If deploying multiple titles to a single user, press for bundled pricing discounts in addition to the tiered price consideration. Incentive discounts should be given for each new title added.

The Contractual Agreement

  • Agreement Type. IAM applications like Okta are also good candidates for an enterprise licensing agreement structure depending on your growth projections, suite of applications required and volume requirements. The ELA can be very complicated and also work against you if not structured properly, so best to seek the advice of a trusted partner before entering an ELA.

Summary

NET(net) can help you maximize your savings on Okta, and with January’s Fiscal Year-End fast approaching, there is no better time to capture value, so Act Now.

Call to Action

Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you save 32-60% on all your SaaS investments, including those with Okta or Sign up now for a Savings Cloud subscription on Okta, and we will get started right away helping you minimize costs and risks, and maximize the realization of value and benefit.

About NET(net)

Founded in 2002, NET(net) is the world’s leading IT Investment Optimization firm, helping clients find, get and keep more economic and strategic value. With over 2,500 clients around the world in nearly all industries and geographies, and with the experience of over 25,000 field engagements with over 250 technology suppliers in XaaS, Cloud, Hardware, Software, Services, Healthcare, Outsourcing, Infrastructure, Telecommunications, and other areas of IT spend, resulting in incremental client captured value in excess of $250 billion since 2002. NET(net) has the expertise you need, the experience you want, and the performance you demand. Contact us today at info@netnetweb.com, visit us online at www.netnetweb.com, or call us at +1-866-2-NET-net to see if we can help you capture more value in your IT investments, agreements, and relationships.

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