Image via CrunchBase
Okta, co-founded by Salesforce veteran Todd McKinnon, has raised $11 million in funding across seed and Series A rounds, with Andreessen Horowitz as lead investor.
According to Xconomy, Okta is targeted medium-sized businesses running multiple third-party cloud applications — think Salesforce, Google Apps or even Twitter and Facebook. The service provides a centralized dashboard giving IT departments an easier way to deploy and manage cloud applications, manage seats and access reporting. For end users at organizations, Okta is a breath of fresh air as it allows for single sign-on across all supported applications; one might even call Okta a Facebook Connect for the enterprise.
“The center of gravity is shifting outside the firewall,” McKinnon said in describing why IT departments need a new network to tie these third-party services together. Okta’s application network comes with built-in integration for hundreds of applications. Supported applications run the gamut and include obvious business picks like Outlook, Salesforce and WebEx, as well as consumer applications a la Box, Drop.io and Dropbox.
Andreessen Horowitz partner and Okta board member Ben Horowitz believes the first-mover startup has the potential to own the enterprise cloud application management category, a category he sees growing rapidly in significance. “Every app category is going to be rewritten in the cloud,” Horowitz said at a recent Okta-hosted press event.
Okta already has a growing set of clients. Eric Wilson, VP of Operations at FusionStorm, couldn’t speak more highly of the service. Wilson talks most highly of Okta’s people sync technology, which allows FusionStorm to maintain an accurate employee database and seamlessly add and remove users across all Okta-managed applications. Other early customers include LiveOps, Pandora and AMAG Pharmaceuticals.
Comments