Your Virtual Bouncer, Now Larger and Stronger and (Soon) Profitable But how secure is Okta, really? From 2021 to 2022 Okta grew from $835 million to $1.3 billion in top line revenue, a 55.63% increase, indicating strong market acceptance. However, the company is still losing money, and losses accelerated by 218.55% in 2022 to -$848M. 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. However, ...
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With recent announcements from Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon, Coinbase, Twitter, and Meta (among others) indicating that there would be cuts to staffing in the coming weeks and months, it’s clear that the recession is in full force. As outlined in my previous blog, we discouraged organizations from making drastic changes to the muscle (the workforce) and bone (the facilities) of their organizations. Yet, many of the big-tech powerhouses (like the ones mentioned above) have been announcing job cuts to curb recessionary pressures. Cutting costs and managing value through downturns can be a far tougher challenge for SME’s than their large ...
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No question Oracle is one of the most dominant and financially successful tech companies in the world. In fact, almost everyone reading this probably directly or indirectly owns a small part of Oracle in their investment portfolio. However, through sales practices, audit actions, acquisitions and never-ending lawsuits, Oracle seems to be relying increasingly on legal tactics and maneuvers to shut down competition and show growth to Wall Street, rather than be a disruptive innovator. Some would say that Oracle’s core competency now is litigation, not innovation. Ongoing War with Rimini Street We have long advocated for seeking alternatives in ...
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‘The Most Wonderful Time of the Year’ is a popular holiday song and was written by Edward Pola and George Wyle in 1963. It was popularized in North America by singer Andy Williams that same year on his television show by the same name. However, we didn’t have to do much research to learn that the inspiration for that song had nothing to do with the 4th quarter for most business leaders and their respective companies. Anecdotally, we believe most business leaders might say it’s the most *stressful* time of the year, especially for publicly traded companies – most of whom have their fiscal year end aligned with the calendar year end of ...
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Like a party no one wanted to go to, the COVID pandemic dragged many IT Executives into (over) spending on technology that was not planned for. In the frenetic pace to ‘keep the lights on’, expenditures were made without the scrutiny they may have normally received pre-COVID. Supporting all the work from anywhere (WFA) initiatives including conferencing, PCs, and remote access software and hardware were all added to the mission critical initiatives already underway, like digital transformation and cloud migrations siphoning money away from those other priorities. As you start planning for your 2022 budgets, you may just now be realizing and ...
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Inflation impacts the cost of nearly all your supplier agreements. Look closely at your IT agreements (especially your Cloud agreements). Even though the cost of technology goes down over time, and technology advancements make processes less manual, less error prone, less expensive, and more automated, many of your agreements still have antiquated clauses allowing your suppliers to *increase* your costs on an annual basis by an amount equal to the Consumer Price Index (CPI) amount, and generally include an accelerator above that amount; something like CPI + 3%, which would provide a contractual right of your supplier to increase your costs ...
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The end of year mania is underway as sales professionals from some of the largest tech companies on the planet try to capture and fill their Q4 quota. When such a substantial portion of a sales rep’s income rests on their ability to separate company dollars from your budget, it’s no wonder we often witness such unbridled aggression this time of year. It can be personally traumatic for salespeople as they sit in their weekly (sometimes daily) sales meetings with their respective teams, while management tears apart their sales opportunities and deals often in front of their peers with questions like: What is the status of deal x/update on ...
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Things are moving fast in these challenging times as both individuals and companies struggle to keep up with changing demands and plan for an uncertain financial future. In response, we are already starting to see many clients (a) put most major technology spending projects on hold and (b) look closely at supplier contracts (almost none of which contemplate a reality such as the one we are facing today). As a result of a confluence of these and other factors, we are seeing an unprecedented level of activity in renegotiating technology supplier contracts, including but not limited to: The force majeure clause in most agreements Government ...
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Unlike consumers who have been panic-buying bathroom paper products in bulk over the last few weeks, IT executives have prepared for security threats and natural disasters for many years and have deployed highly resilient solutions with varying degrees of business continuity. Clients have spent millions for things like network redundancy, contact center contingency planning, remote workforce support, and business application and underlying compute and storage infrastructure availability. The list could go on. In fact, there is a whole industry set up to help IT leaders face this business continuity challenge. What many of those plans fell ...
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Clients are well advised to include specific language governing Oracle audits. Most important is the ability to purchase any compliance licenses as a result of an audit action at the contractual price hold discounts (#12 on our Oracle's Most Egregious list), and in the event that the price hold expires, at a mutually agreeable discount at the prevailing discounts available in the market for similar deals not to be unreasonably withheld. The current contract language in the standard Oracle agreement requires clients to purchase compliance licenses at list price. In the case of a 75% price hold discount, this would mean you are acquiring the ...
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