Okta reported their earnings yesterday and the cloud-based identity management company came through with flying colors for the most part.
For starters, revenue was a healthy $68.2 million. That’s up 61 percent year over year. Meanwhile, subscription revenue (that’s recurring revenue) was up 64 percent year over year to a total of $62.7 million.
On the downside, the company losses widened in the third quarter. “The GAAP operating loss was $35.2 million, or 51.6% of total revenue, compared to $21.9 million in the third quarter of fiscal 2017 or 51.8% of total revenue,” the company reported in a statement.
This is just Okta’s first year as a public company, but it has always been the identity layer for the public cloud, providing a way to log into your cloud services in a business context. Early on, cloud services were often used outside of the realm of IT, but as SaaS gained mainstream acceptance, it required tools like Okta to give IT a level of control while simplifying the logon process across multiple services.
The vision thing
Okta had a vision early on when it launched in 2009 that the cloud needed an identity layer. While there were identity management solutions like Microsoft’s popular Active Directory, at the time most (if not all) were designed for use behind the firewall, not the new breed of cloud applications that were coming like Box, Zendesk, Workday, and of course, Salesforce.
Before Okta came along, individuals had to have a log-on for each cloud service they used. If you worked in a company that used a bunch of them that could be a big pain in the butt remembering and entering your credentials for each one.
Okta gave employees the ability to log on to multiple cloud services (and eventually in-house services) too providing that single point of entry customers were used to having with their on-prem software packages.
Today, the company has more than 3,000 customers and announced several new ones including CBRE, Nordstrom, and City of Las Vegas. Existing clients include LinkedIn, Flex, News Corp, Dish Networks, MGM Resorts, Lyft, Tesla, and Adobe. In total, Okta boast 40 million people across all of their customers on the Okta platform.
The company, which went public in April, also reported plans to move its headquarters, signing a 10 year lease at 100 First Street. That certainly signals a company that’s in it for the long haul. It takes some time for SaaS companies to find their way on Wall Street after going public but if they keep the revenue up and find a way to tighten up the losses, they should be fine in the long run.
Photo: Victoria Shapiro / Shutterstock.
