Okta's Oktane 2025 | Jon Addison, Okta

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Jon Addison

Chief Revenue Officer

Okta

play_circle_outline Okta's Oktane conference highlights a thriving partner ecosystem and collaboration opportunities.

play_circle_outline Partner contributed pipeline up 35% year-over-year; partner influence represents 75% of Okta's business.

play_circle_outline Enhancing Partner Success: A New Portal for Integration, Training, and Sales Support in Today's Evolving Market

play_circle_outline Collaborative projects see multiple partners working together for complex identity security solutions.

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Jon Addison, Okta

Jon Addison

Chief Revenue Officer Okta

Okta’s partner-first strategy takes center stage in this Oktane 2025 interview as Jon Addison, chief revenue officer of Okta, joins theCUBE host Rebecca Knight and analyst Jackie McGuire. Addison explains how Okta is embedding partners across its business, from co-selling motions to training and certification. He shares growth indicators such as a 35% increase in partner pipeline and 20% annual ARR growth.

The conversation turns to how identity is becoming the control plane for AI-driven enterprise infrastructure and how Okta is enabling secure collabo... Read more

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What insights were shared about the partner ecosystem at Okta's Oktane conference? add

What recent metrics were shared regarding the performance and influence of partner relationships in a business ecosystem? add

What are the key focuses for the company's initiatives this year regarding partner integration and support? add

What are the characteristics and complexities involved in partner relationships for long-term service delivery projects in technology implementations? add

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Jon Addison, Okta

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Rebecca Knight

>> Good afternoon everyone, and welcome back to theCUBE's Live coverage of Okta's Oktane. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, alongside Jackie McGuire, my co-host and analyst. One thing that's so clear being here at this conference is the partner ecosystem is alive and well here.

Jackie McGuire

>> Yeah. Actually, I walked around the expo hall and started talking to some vendors. I was like, "Hey, how's the conference?" And they were like the quality of customer we're interacting with, the large size of some of the customers we've been able to interact with, so great feedback so far on Okta's ability to kind of draw in the partners and people that our vendors want to work with.

Rebecca Knight

>> So here, to talk more about that is Jon Addison, he's Chief Revenue Officer at Okta. Thank you so much for coming on.

Jon Addison

>> Great to be here. Thanks for hosting.

Rebecca Knight

>> So you have said that Okta's strategy is partner first. What does that mean in practice, and how do you translate that to real life?

Jon Addison

>> Well, I think first thing is it's not just a statement of intent. This is our DNA. So this is everything that we're about in go to market and we've been at it for some time. So partner first means many different things, but it's about a long-term commitment to our business being a partner first business. And that touches us in many, many different areas. I mean, I think if you think about our geographies, our segments and the very broad partner ecosystem we have, there's a lot of surface area there. Well, not today, but yesterday, we had our partner summit and it was great to see so many ecosystem partners show up and attend and really participate in a day where not only we celebrated them and there's a lot to celebrate with their successes, but also talk about what the next year is going to bring. And on the successes, it's important to highlight just some of the metrics about how well things are going with our partners. So if you look at the top of our funnel, for example, it's a great health indicator. It's up 35% year-over-year with partner contributed pipeline. If you look at our partner ARR growth, it's been up 20% this year, but it's been up 20% every year for the last three years. Partner influence business here at Okta, it represents 75% of our business. So these are great health indicators that this strategy is playing out, but when we talk about landing partner first and really making it mean something to the partner community, it's about really how it's hitting home for them day to day. And for us this year, it was about three key things. Firstly, technology and training. So we're really enabling them to be seamlessly integrated into Okta through a new partner portal. That means they're going to get great content about our solutions. They're going to get great enablement, great sales plays. The second piece is just really how we're leaning in on training them. So we've just been through a huge certification effort with all the field salespeople in Okta around our two platforms and around our story. We're taking that directly to our partners too. We're going to train them on the same stuff. The second piece is about how we're investing in them and that's doubling down on our headcount, our partner marketing budget. They're going to have many more people supporting them. The third bit, which I personally drove as the CRO, is about how we're incentivizing Okta to really deliver in a partner-first motion. And so I've changed all the comp plans for the AEs recently to actually incentivize their AEs to co-sell partner services. And we're also taking in October the whole of the field organization through a new training which specifically is going to embed the right behaviors so that when our field shows up with our partners in the co-sell motion, there's no friction. Because we know when we are selling with partners that we win big, and it's also great for our customers. The last point, when partners are involved, our customers, the renewal rate with them is 15% higher. So we're all in with partners because partners give us happier, more successful customer relationships. It's simple as that.

Jackie McGuire

>> I think there's a couple of things that I just want to really emphasize, because I've been speaking, I'm an analyst when I'm not on camera and I talk to a lot of vendors and managing partners is really something that some of them struggle with. And I think, one, it requires a very precise level of messaging clarity. I always say you get 10 words to explain to your partners, your BBR, everybody what you do. And also, you talked about enablement, and I think that's another place where vendors really under-invest in their partners is that you have to have enable them to go to market in a very cohesive way with you. One thing I want to ask is with this cross app access, Okta seems like it's now in a place to almost be kind of the point of orchestration for your partners. Is that one of the things that drove this? I mean this ability is kind of an existential imperative for being able to use agents effectively, but is that one of the things you see as an opportunity, the fact that you guys now have this ability to sit between different partners and really make that work?

Jon Addison

>> Well, identity sits at the heart of so many things. That being an identity management company that's independent, cloud-native, it's always attracted a very broad partner ecosystem to it. We're highly relevant to people who want to sell our solutions to customers. We're highly relevant to partners who want to build a services business around Okta alongside other identity solutions. Because beyond just the initial implementation of our products and platforms, there's a long-term services like business associated with our platforms because companies business needs change, regulatory compliance changes, they put in new applications, they restructure, they do M&A. So advisory and consulting services around identity has always been a really big deal for partners. But there's also the technology landscape and how applications, how application vendors build their software to integrate into an identity fabric. That's a really important part of how they themselves are going to be successful as they sell their products to the enterprise or build products for consumers. And so we have to be super cognizant of all of these touch points. Protocols like cross app access, they're obviously very helpful because it allows application vendors to understand how to integrate their solutions into those protocols so that when they're filling out RFPs and they're going to sell their solutions to new customers, we hope there's going to be a point where cross app access is a requirement for that. But these are solving solutions that have always applied. And if you look at our Okta integration network, 8,000 integrations in there and growing all the time, we've always invested in a very vibrant and healthy ecosystem in the technology landscape because we've had to, because we're in the enterprise and we're independent. So it's just like part of what we do.

Rebecca Knight

>> Awesome. So the AI wave is creating a lot of excitement and buzz, but also a lot of anxiety. We heard Todd McKinnon up there on the main stage talking about AI FOMO. How are you helping customers who are turning to you and your partners to help them make sense of the risks and the opportunities?

Jon Addison

>> Well, one of the awesome things about Oktane always is the ability to hear about this live from customers and in real time. And I've just come out of the executive summit. We just had a whole host of roundtable discussions with some senior executives from our customers and prospects. And the table I hosted was all about your question, which is about where are they with aI, specifically agentic development, and how are they thinking about the risk factors associated with it. And what's super clear is they're all doing it right. And there are varying degrees of maturity like some at the very extreme end, and they've been at this for years, but they're all on this sort of maturity cycle about how they can leverage the benefit of AI and agents in production. However, as we see in some of the data and the analysis where 90% of enterprises, like they're using agents now, but only 10% claim to have a mature strategy and roadmap for managing the security of them and the governance of them. So this governance gap in terms of the implementation of agents is front and center around how we understand the value of AI security as it pertains to identity. And this is our comfort zone, right? Because the management of agentic security for us, it's very similar to the ongoing management of non-human identity and human identity that we've been at for years. It touches many different points within identity security fabric, which is what companies of all sizes buy to manage all identity types. And we understand how to manage identity types with relationship to all applications and all resources. And really how agents access different types of applications and different types of resources is no different in terms of the development of them, the governance of them, the administration of them to other forms of identity. So really, that's at the heart of some of our product releases this week. Okta is specifically designed for AI agents and Auth0, the same. So we're super excited about the relevance of agentic security to our existing platforms. We've got new innovation around it. And the last point is really about Auth0. Auth0 is a key platform that allows the secure development of different types of applications and now agents. And so how the Auth0 platform is going to be leveraged to really build agents secure from the ground up and make them fabric ready, that's an incredible developer led story too. So lots of excitement, lots of relevance, and I think a really strong endorsement of our platform story across both Okta and Auth0.

Jackie McGuire

>> That's amazing. So when we think about go-to-market motions ... So I wrote in my 2025 preview for this year that identity was going to be one of the largest pieces or the fastest growing pieces of TAM, and then services is going to be the other one. So as you're going to market, you have this really, really powerful offering with your service providers, because as you mentioned, there's this great opportunity to build a whole services structure around identity. So what does that playbook look like as you're going to market? Do you have any examples of customers, customer success stories where you've had a really effective go-to-market motion?

Jon Addison

>> So it really ties back to the beginning of this conversation. There is no way we can do this alone. These are complex problems to solve. And as you break it down by customer cohorts, industry vertical, and every single customer and prospect story about their legacy, how they got here, what their strategy is going to be like for the future, we have technical expertise around security and AI, but we really need a partner with companies that deeply understand our customers and prospect's business needs. And so the ongoing service delivery around this is a very long-term engagement cycle, set of implementations and projects, but also the consulting and advisory layer that supports that is super business critical. So we need different partners of different types. 40% of our deals, they involve multiple partners. So when we partner, we're not just doing it with one partner type, right? It takes a village to get this right. And we see in some really complex projects. We've got so many examples. We've got a live project right now with a very significant technology company. They're moving onto the identity security fabric, very broad set of business use cases. They're trying to remove 17 disparate identity solutions during that program of work. When new logos are coming to us, they're now landing Okta not just as an access management solution, but really across the broad fabric. So even in the initial implementation, they're looking at which systems they're replacing, which systems need to coexist with, what their stakeholder groups are, which are often very broad. So we've got a lot of bases to cover and there's lots of different service lines associated with that. So these projects often take a village, it's a very exciting opportunity for the partner ecosystem, but the great news is they're leaning in very strong.

Jackie McGuire

>> How are you managing? So post Auth0 acquisition, those are two very different customer bases. You have Okta. How are you as the CRO managing that kind of serving both of those markets as they start to converge, because there's this weird gray area between them where people are sort of acting as engineers through AI agents, and then engineers are also needing to create agentic ready apps? So how do you think about serving that broad customer base?

Jon Addison

>> It takes consideration and refinement always, because what we know with our platforms, like you say, is that they have two very distinct buying persona groups who've got very different needs. Now, there are areas where those needs converge, right? And agentic development and management is a good example of that. But engaging with them, because each of our platforms are actually quite broad and the way that those buying personas think and get funded and make decisions is very different. For our enterprise customers this year, we actually took a decision to specialize the way we go to market around those two buying communities. And it's playing out well, it's still early days, and we've had a great H1 in terms of the pipeline that's been generated in association with that. But when you understand how chief technology officers, chief digital officers, chief product officers, and developers think about developing B2C and consumer applications, it's very different to how IT and security leaders think about workforce identity, B2B, governance, security, and managing things like agents in the wild.

Jackie McGuire

>> I think it was great by the way that in your most recent earnings release, you were very transparent about that specialization process. Because you guys had double-digit growth almost across the board. But when you were setting expectations, you said, "Hey, we're starting this specialization. This takes a little bit of time to work out." And you were very realistic in your guidance. And I think not a lot of companies do that, so kudos by the way. Because as I was reading the earnings, I was like, "Wow, they're being very honest about I've gone through segmentation and specialization at vendors," and it's not always easy. And so great job on, by the way, on kind of ... And you guys always tend to be very realistic when you're talking to the market, which I think is great, but I really appreciated that coming from a vendor and being like, "Wow, they're actually being transparent about the fact that this is a process." And it may impact things for a few quarters.

Jon Addison

>> It's still early days. We're very excited about it. But with all big changes like that, there's cost of change. You had to move around territories, move around accounts, new reps, we've got new roles and new managers. There's a lot of changes. But I think when I see our team show up with complex use cases that are evolving all the time with specific buying persona needs, with increasingly growing platforms, with new products coming across all the time, for me, I get a real sense of purpose and clarity that a setting up go-to-market to specifically address those needs is a good idea, and so I'm very excited about its prospects.

Rebecca Knight

>> Excellent. Well, Jon, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. A real pleasure having you on.

Jon Addison

>> Thank you very much. Enjoyed the conversation.

Rebecca Knight

>> I'm Rebecca Knight. For Jackie McGuire, stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of Okta's Oktane. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise news and analysis.