 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hi, but this is Dave Vellante and welcome to this special CUBE Conversation. As you know, I've been running a CXO series now for several weeks, really trying to understand how leaders are dealing and coping with the COVID-19 crisis. Today, we want to switch gears a little bit and talk not only about how leadership has sort of navigated through this crisis, but also start to imagine what it's going to look like coming out of it. I'm going to introduce you to a company that I've been talking about now for the last, well, six to nine months, company called OCTA. As you know from my previous breaking analysis, this is a company that not only is in the security business, they really kind of made their mark with identification management. But also really there's a data angle. Normally when you think about security, you think about, oh, security, it means less user flexibility. It means less value from the user standpoint. What OCTA has done really successfully is bring together both endpoint security as well as that data angle. And so the company's about $600 million in revenue. They got an $18 billion valuation, which may sound kind of rich at 30X revenue multiple, but as I've reported, the company is growing very rapidly. I've talked about the rule of 40. OCTA is really a rule of 50 type of company by that definition. And with me here to talk about the product side of things is Dya Jolly, who's the Chief Product Officer at OCTA. Dya, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. I hope you're doing okay. How are things out in California? Things are going well. Good to meet you as well, Dave. I hope you're doing well as well. Yeah, we're hanging in there. The studios are rocking. theCUBE continues our daily reporting. I want to start with your role. You're relatively new to OCTA. You've got a really interesting background, particularly understanding endpoints. You were at Google, Google Home, Google Nest. You spent some time worrying about looking after Xbox. So you have a good understanding of what's going on in the marketplace, but talk about your role and how specifically you're bringing that to enterprise. So I joke about this. I say that I've done every kind of known product management imaginable to man at this point, done both hardware, down software. So dealt a lot with endpoints as you've talked about, dealt a lot with SaaS, dealt with consumer, dealt with enterprise, all over the place, companies of different sizes. So at OCTA, really my role as the Chief Product Officer is to be able to understand what our customers need. What are the challenges they're facing and not just the challenges they're facing today, but also what are the challenges that they'll face tomorrow that they don't even know about and then help build products to be able to overcome that, both with our engineering teams as well as with our sales engineering team so that we can take it to market. Now, my background is unique because I've seen so many identity being used in so many different ways across so many different use cases, whether it's enterprise or its consumer, that given that we covered both sides of the spectrum, I can bring that to bear. Yeah, so what I've reported previously is that you guys kind of made your mark with identification management, but in terms of both workforce but also customer identification management, which has been, I think, allowed you to be very, very successful. I want to bring up a chart and share something that I've shared a lot of data with our audience previously. So guys, if you could bring that up. So this is data from Enterprise Technology Research, our data partner, and for those who follow this program, you know we generally talk in two metrics. NetScore, which is a measure of spending momentum, and also MarketShare, which really isn't real MarketShare, but it's pervasiveness in the survey. And what you can see here is the latest April survey from over 1200 CIOs and IT practitioners and we're isolating on Okta and we brought it back to the July 15 survey. You see a couple of points here I want to make. One is it's up into the right. This is pervasiveness or MarketShare. So Okta in the market is doing very, very well. It's why the valuation is so high. What's driving the growth? And then you can see in the green a 55% NetScore, very, very strong. It's one of the leaders in security. But as I said, it's more than that. So, D, from a product standpoint, what is powering this momentum? Sure. So, as you well know, the world is working from home. What Okta does is it provides identity management that allows you to connect to any technology. And by any technology, it primarily means technology that's not just on-premise, like your applications on-premise, old school applications or infrastructure that's on-premise. But it also means technology that's in the cloud. So SaaS applications. Infrastructure that's in the cloud, et cetera. And on the other hand, it also allows companies to deploy applications where they can connect to their customers online. So as more and more of the world moves to work from home, you need to be able to securely and seamlessly allow your employees, your partners to be able to connect from their home to be able to do their work. And that's the foundation that we provide. Now, if you look at, we've heard a lot in the press about companies like Zoom, Slack, people that provide online collaboration and their usage has gone up. We're seeing similar trends across both Okta as well as the entire security industry in general, right? If you look at information recently, since COVID has started, phishing attacks have increased by 667%. And what we've seen in response is one of our products which is multi-factor authentication. We've experienced an 80% growth in usage. So really as COVID has pushed forward, there was a trend for people to be able to work remotely, for people to be able to access cloud apps. But as COVID has suddenly poured gas in the fire for that, we're seeing our customers reaching out to us a lot more, needing more support, and just the level of awareness and the level of interest rising. Let's talk about some of the trends that you guys see in the marketplace. And I'd like to better understand how that informs your product road map and decisions. Obviously there's cloud. You guys have made a really good mark in the cloud space with both your operating model, your pricing model, the modern static. The other is I referenced it upfront with data. Talk a lot about digital transformation, digital to us data. Of course, the third is security related to trust. We've talked a lot on theCUBE about how the perimeter is, there is no perimeter anymore. The queen has left her castle. And so what are the big trends that you see, the big waves that you're riding and how does that inform your product direction? Sure, so a few different things. I think number one, if you think about the way I phrase this is or the way I think about it as the following. Any big technological trend you see today, right? Whether it's the move to the cloud, whether it's mobile, whether it's artificial intelligence, whether you think about neural nets, et cetera, or it's a personalized consumer experience. All of that fundamentally depends on identity. So the most important, so from being an identity provider, the most important thing for us is to be able to build something that is flexible enough, that is broad enough that it is able to span multiple use cases, right? So we've taken from a product perspective that means we can follow two philosophies. We can either be trying to go solve each of these pain points one by one, or we can actually try to build a platform that is more open, that's more extensible and that's more flexible so that we can solve many of these use cases, right? And not only can we solve it because it's extensible, our customers can customize it, they can build on top of it, our partners can build on top of it. So that's one thing, that's one product philosophy that we hold dear. And so we have the Octite Identity Cloud which is a platform that provides both workforce identity as well as customer identity using the same underlying components, the same multi-factor authentication we use for workforce, we package up as an SDK so that our customer identity customers can use it. So that's number one. The second thing as you rightfully mention is data, you can't really secure identity without data. So we have a lot of data across our customers. We know when the user's logging in, we know what device they're logging in from, we know the security posture of the device, we know where they're logging in from, we know their different behaviors, what apps they go into or during what time of the day, et cetera. So being able to harness all this data to say, hey, and apply ML model script to say, hey, is the user secure or not is a very, very core foundation of our product. So for example, we have what we call risk-based authentication. You can not only do things like, hey, this user seems to be logging on from a location they've never logged on from, but you could even do things like, well, you may not want to stop the user, they may be traveling. So instead of just asking them for a password, you ask them for a multi-factor, right? So that's the other piece of it. And in many ways, data and security and usability are three legs of a triangle. The more data you have, the more you can allow a user, the more security you can provide a user without creating more friction. So it's sometimes helpful for the audience to understand a company in a competitive context and the landscape. So the obvious platform out there is Active Directory, now Microsoft with Azure Active Directory, really trying to, and that's really been on their platforms, but with APIs, Microsoft has got thumbs in every pie. How does Okta differentiate from some of the other traditional platforms that are out there? And what gives you confidence that it can continue to do so going forward post COVID? That's a fantastic question, Dave. So I think we divide, if you think about our competitors, on the workforce side, we've got Microsoft and a couple of other competitors. And on the customer identity side, really it's a bill versus buy story, right? Most companies build customer identity internally. So let's take workforce first. Microsoft is the dominant player there. They've got Active Directory, they've now got Azure Active Directory. From a Microsoft perspective, I think Microsoft is always been great at building products or building technology that interconnected product. The world is going to more, there's more and more technology proliferation in the world. And the way we differentiate is by becoming a neutral and independent platform. So whether you're on a Microsoft stack, whether you're on a Google stack, whether you're on an Amazon stack, we are able to connect with you deeply. We connect just as well with O365 as we connect with Salesforce as we connect with AWS, right? And that has been our core philosophy. And not only is that a philosophy for other vendors, it's a philosophy for ourselves as well. We have multi-factor authentication. So do many other providers like Duo. If you want to use ours, great. If you don't want to use ours with our platform, go use the one that's best for your technology. And I think what we've always believed in from a product perspective is this independence, this neutrality, this ability to plug and play any technology you want into a platform to be able to do what you want and the technology that's best for your business's needs. So what's interesting, what you said about the sort of make versus buy, that's particularly relevant for the customer identification management because let's say I'm buying from Amazon, I've got Amazon, they know who I am. But if I understand it correctly, your customers now are able to look across brands, maybe cohort selling, maybe make specific offers, analyze the data, that's an advantage that you bring that maybe do it yourself doesn't bring. Maybe talk about that a little bit. Sure. So really if you think about a bill versus buy, even 10 years ago, life used to be relatively simple. Maybe 15 years ago, you had a website, you had a username, you had a password. You weren't really using, you didn't have multiple channels, you didn't have multiple devices as prevalent, you didn't have multiple apps in a lot of cases connected to each other, right? And in that day and age, password was fairly secure, you weren't doing a lot of personalization with the user data or had a lot of sensitive user data. So building a customer identity solution, having your customer, managing your customer's identity yourself was fairly easy. Now it's becoming more and more hard. Number one, I just talked about the phishing attacks, they're equal number of attacks on the customer identity side, right? So how do you actually secure this identity? How do you actually use things like multi-factor authentication? How do you keep up with all the latest in multi-factor authentication, touch ID, face ID, et cetera? That's one. The second thing we provide a scale for a number of companies, we also provide the ability to scale dramatically, which scaling identity and being able to authenticate someone and keep someone authenticated in real time is actually a very big challenge as you get to more and more scale. And then the last thing that you mentioned is this ability, we provide a single view of the user, which is super, super powerful, because now if you think about one of our customers, Albertsons, they have multiple different apps, they have multiple different digital experiences. They don't have a siloed view of their customer across all these experiences. You have one identity for your customer, that customer user, that one identity to log on to all your digital experiences across all channels and we're able to bring that data back together. So if Albertsons wants to say, hey, somebody shopped in or bought something in one particular app, but I know people that buy this particular object like something else that's available in another app, they can give a promotion for it or they can give a discomfort. That's, so that makes a lot of sense. I went into the ETR platform to get our data partner and I looked at which industries are really showing momentum. Remember this survey folks was run right in the heart of the COVID-19 pandemic from mid-March to mid-April. So it's a good current data point and there were four that stood out, large companies, healthcare and pharma, Telco, which of course is this work from home thing and then consumer. The example that you just gave from Albertsons is really sort of around that consumer. There are a lot of industries that obviously been hit, airlines, restaurants, hospitality, but these four really stood out as growth areas despite the COVID-19 pandemic. I want to ask you about Octane. You just had your big user conference. Anything product specific that came out of that that our audience should know about? I mean, I'm interested in Access Gateway. I know that wasn't necessarily a new announcement, Cloud Gateway, what were the highlights of some of those things from a product stand? Yeah, of course. So we made a very difficult decision to pivot Octane virtually. We did this because a number of our customers, given what they're facing with the COVID pandemic, wanted to hear more around news, around what our product launches are, how they could use this, et cetera. And really I'd say there are three key product launches that I want to highlight here. We had a number of different announcements and it was a very successful conference. But the three that are the most relevant here. One is we've always talked about being a platform and we've set this for the past four to five years, I think. But over the last year and going into the next couple of years, we're investing very, very heavily in making our platform even more powerful, even more extensible, even more customizable so that it can go across the scenarios that you've described, right? Which is whether you're on-prem with Octax's gateway or you're in the cloud or you're in some kind of hybrid environment or you're using some mix and match or work from home, people in the office, et cetera. So really what we did this year over the last year was deepen our platform footprint. And we started releasing the core components available in a platform, which we call platform services. So we have six components. We were directories that is customizable and flexible so you can build your own schemas, et cetera. And you can store users, apps, information related to them. We have an integration platform that we've made available at a deep level where our customers can use SDKs, tools, et cetera to be able to integrate with Octa. We have a data platform, which we've talked a lot about. And then we released three new platform services. And one was what we call Octa Identity Engine. We talked about this last year and this year we talked about it last year from a customer identity perspective. This year we broaden it to our workforce identity. But also what that does is it allows you a lot more flexibility for situations like we're in, right? It allows you flexibility to define security policies at the per app level. So you could decide, hey, for my email, I don't want my customers to have to use a multi-factor authentication, but for Salesforce, I would definitely want them to use a multi-factor authentication if they're not in the office. It also allows you to have a lot more flexible factor recovery. So for example, if you forgot your password, one of the biggest pain points of COVID has been the number of help desk costs. I've been rising through the roof. The phone calls are ringing nonstop, right? And one of the biggest reasons for help desk costs is, oh, I can't log in. I got logged out. I either lost a factor or I forgot my password, so it helps with that. So that's one set of announcements. The second set of announcements was we launched a brand new devices platform. And personally, this is my personal favorite, but really what the devices platform allows you to do is the feature in it that we launched is called FastPass. And what FastPass allows you to do is it actually takes password list to the next level. It allows you to basically use logging into your device and us understanding the posture of the device and all the user context around you to be able to log you directly into Okta. So now imagine if you're on a Mac or a iOS device or an Android or a Windows device, just being able to face match into your iOS or being able to touch ID into your Windows Hello and you're automatically logged into Okta, right? That is, and the way we do that is we have this client across all these operating systems that can really understand the security posture of the device. It can understand if the device is managed, if it's safe, if it's jailbroken, if it's unmanaged, it can also connect with multiple signals on the device. So if you have an EDR or an MDM vendor, we can ingest those signals and what they think of the risk. We can also ingest signals directly from apps. If apps think like G Suite and Salesforce actually track user behavior at a certain risk, they can pass those signals to us. And then we can make a decision on, hey, we should allow the user to authenticate directly into Okta because they've authenticated into their device. We can make a decision that says, no, let's ask them to step up with a multi-factor authentication. Or we can say, no, this is too risky. Let's deny access. And all of this is configurable by the IT admin. They can decide the risk levels they're comfortable with. They can decide the different risk levels by different apps. So that was another major announcement. And then, and as a product person, you rarely ever get the chance to actually increase security and usability at one time, which is why it's my favorite. You increase both security and usability together. Now, the last one was a workflows engine. We call it workflows lifecycle management. And we, it's really, we launched a graphical no-code user interface. Identity is so important, so many business processes for our customers. There's so many business processes built on identity. For example, if someone joins your company, you usually either have a script that allows them access to the applications they need to, or you actually have an IT admin sitting in there trying to manually provide access. Or when they leave, right? What workflows lifecycle management or lifecycle management workflows allows you to do, is it actually allows you to provide, it actually provides you with a no-code graphical user interface where you can build all these flows. So now you don't need someone that knows coding. You can even have a business unit. So for example, if I, for me in the product, for the product org, I can have someone say, hey, build a business process. Similarly, it's something you would build in sort of like an iPad. And allow everyone that comes in to be able to have access to Figma because we use Figma a lot, right? Those are the kinds of things you can do and it's super powerful. And it takes the ability of our already existing lifecycle management product to the next level. Well, thank you for that summary, Dya. So I want to kind of close with, I mean, those of you have been following theCUBE for a while. I think there's some similarities between Okta and ServiceNow. They're obvious differences, but we started following ServiceNow pre-IPO was less than a hundred million dollar company. And we've seen that company build out as a platform company. And that's really what Okta is doing here. We're talking about a total available market that's probably north of 50 billion. So the question I have here is, you know what Frederick and Todd started 11 years ago, playing on the dynamics coming out of the financial crisis then got us to where we are today. Now you've got the challenge of you've achieved, reached escape velocity. Now you've got this massive growth opportunity in front of you. How do you see the product portfolio evolving, expanding? And I'm also interested in post COVID-19, you know, no whiteboards, no face to face contact, at least not for a while and how you're kind of managing through that. But how can we expect the product portfolio to expand over time? What can you share with us? Sure, let me answer the question on the product portfolio. So one of the, given how pervasive identity has become and given how not just broad, but at the same time deep it is, there are multiple different places our product portfolio can evolve to and a number of different places we're thinking about, right? So one, as you mentioned, today we play in workforce identity and customer identity. But we haven't even begun to talk about how we might play in consumer identity, right? One of the biggest threat measures is consumers and consumers protecting their own identity. So often an employee is not using their identity to lock the sales force and you have an attack on a company and often an employee is actually logging into their Gmail, their personal Gmail or their personal or some personal website, their bank and their credential get compromised and they're using the same pass for the product. So the more we protect consumers, the more we can directly protect both enterprises from an employee as well as a customer perspective. Obviously we're an enterprise company, so it doesn't mean that we are going to go direct to consumer but there are ways to make employees more secure by with a direct to consumer offering it. So that's one. The second thing is managing identities. I think we've as the number of applications as the number of technologies are proliferate, managing an employee's life cycle through that, governing that the life cycle is matched properly administering, et cetera, is also pretty, it's also becoming very, very challenging. It was all well and good when there were 10 apps and you were on, that's not true anymore. An average company uses I think close to 200 applications and then if you broaden that to other resources like infrastructure, there's a lot, lot more. So how do you actually build automated systems that based on the employee's status, based on their role, based on the project they're on provides them the right access for the right amount of time. The third thing you mentioned is, and you touched on this initially, but there's this concept of zero trust security, right? The parameters disappeared, how do you provide zero trust security? So if you look at the industry at large today, there are tons of different security vendors trying to provide security at each point. If you talk to any CISO, it's really, really hard to cobble all of this together. And one of the things we're trying to do is, we're trying to figure out how with our partners, we can build a end-to-end solution for end-to-end zero trust for our customers. So that's another area of the product portfolio we're pushing. And then finally, with the whole digital transformation and customer identity, yes, more and more companies want their customers to interact online. Yes, more and more customers find convenience of being able to interact online. But really if you think about it, the world has changed dramatically over the last two or three years with privacy laws, with things like GDPR, CCP, et cetera. How do you actually manage your customers privacy? How do you actually manage their consent? How do you ensure that while you're using all this data from across these apps that we talked about, and you're using it for the customer's benefit, how do you make sure that they get us to private, they're still secure? And how do you ensure your customers trust? That's another major area that I think our customers are asking us for help in. And so those are the areas or so that you should see us make significant progress over the next two to three years. Obviously, we're gonna take a platform approach to it. We don't believe we can solve everything ourselves. So some of it will be us building ourselves, other of it will be building a platform and helping our partners build on top of us. Us and some of it will be through partnership. But that's generally the high-level directions we're headed in. Well, thank you so much for coming on the Q and the Q and sharing the product roadmap and some other details of Okta. Great company, really interested in watching its continued ascendancy. Good luck in the marketplace. And thank you for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante, Cube Conversations. We'll see you next time.