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Cloud security market landscape, 2013–2017

Keren Elazari — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 06:55:57 +0000

Cyber threats are now a critical issue affecting the national security of nation countries worldwide. At the same time, the IT world is witnessing a wave of new innovation, and there are numerous business opportunities for technologies built around the emerging market sectors of mobile and cloud computing. These technologies and the companies creating with them will form the future of cloud security over the next several years.

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Social 2013: The enterprise strikes back

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 07:55:38 +0000

In 2013 look for the action in social technologies to be increasingly enterprise-focused. In 2012 investors soured on consumer social media companies: Groupon, Zynga, and even Facebook were deemed disappointing. Arguably, Facebook left no money on the table. As it began to show revenue from mobile by the year’s end, its stock began to recover, but the damage was done. So a different set of companies will drive innovation and perhaps a little disruption in social technologies in 2013. Look for the likes of Salesforce.com, Jive Software, and other enterprise players to make headlines in the new year.

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Okta gets $25M more to take on cloud identity management

Stacey Higginbotham — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 16:00:08 +0000

Okta, an almost-four-year-old startup pushing a new type of identity management aimed at cloud-based enterprise applications, has raised $25 million in third-round funding. This round brings the San Francisco-based company to $52 million in total funding. New investor Sequoia Capital led the round with existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, Khosla Ventures and Floodgate also participating.

Okta is part of the cohort of companies that have seen the shift to the cloud as an opportunity to rethink the way legacy enterprise software is built. Other players include Boundary, Aryaka and Workday. Each of these firms has seen the way that cloud computing and software as a service can disrupt the enterprise IT market and have made bold bets building out new services that take advantage of the decentralized nature of the cloud, cheaper compute or new business models. The real question as the startups gain customers and credibility is which of the IT giants will buy them and for how much of a premium?

Okta, for example, offers a centralized identity management platform that competes with services such as Microsoft’s Active Directory and Oracle’s Identity Management suite. Okta’s software works to establish user identity on both cloud applications but also for legacy and on-premise programs. This saves Okta’s customers from having to use two different identity management products for employees. Todd McKinnon, CEO, Okta told me in an interview ahead of the announcement that it has seen a lot of success recently stealing customers from the established vendors, and that the funding will help it continue to invest in connecting its platform to older, legacy applications that its customers want integrated into the Okta software.

Otka says it has added more than 140 enterprise customers and 300,000 users to its service in 2012, including Allergan, BMC Software, Clorox, Groupon and National Geographic. Okta has developed relationships with more than 2,000 cloud applications, all of which come pre-integrated in the Okta Application Network, and counts leading enterprise SaaS companies such as Jive, Lithium and SuccessFactors as customers.

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Coming from Salesforce.com: A Dropbox for the enterprise

Eliza Kern — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 20:43:51 +0000

Enterprise software’s scrappy startups make headlines for challenging legacy software companies, but some of their elders still have some tricks up their sleeves. Case in point: Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff who pre-announced his company’s planned Dropbox for the enterprise which was to be formally announced at the company’s Dreamforce conference next week.

Dropbox is the hugely popular consumer cloud storage service that has been dragged inside companies by people who want to use it at work. That trend spooks IT people who cite security issues about users accessing corporate files with their own devices. And that concern, in turn, spawned reams of self-proclaimed enterprise-class cloud storage and file sharing offerings from Box, VMware, Citrix and others.

Benioff will not be left out of that fray. At TechCrunch Disrupt on Tuesday, he followed a panel full of startups — including Asana, Okta and Box, with news that Salesforce will take them all on.

“Next week at Dreamforce we have our Okta competitor coming out which is Salesforce Identity, we have our Box competitor coming out which is called Chatterbox, and we have our Asana competitor Do.com,” Benioff said. “So it’s competition. It’s good.”

Benioff explained that by providing these products, from single sign-in with Salesforce Identity or file-sharing with Chatterbox, the company meets customer demand for those products without requiring them to leave the Salesforce environment. But Benioff noted that Salesforce, which invested in Box.net just last year, isn’t necessarily out to kill the smaller startups, and is open to collaboration when it makes sense:

“We’ve invested in a couple of them, we compete with a couple of them, we partner with a couple of htem, and that’s kind of the nature of the industry,” he said. “Our industry is not about the Hunger Games. I don’t look at our industry as a zero sum game.”

There’s no question that a major push from Salesforce, whose products are used by companies like Facebook, to integrate changes into existing software could challenge the startups making tracks in enterprise. But before Benioff spoke, Box co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie spoke passionately on the startup advantage in a world dominated by older, larger players:

“They want the thing that’s going to take them into the future faster, and they’re not biased toward one vendor or another,” Levie said of the modern enterprise customer. “And that gives startups an unfair advantage that the legacy players don’t have.”

And even after Benioff’s announcement, Levie remained characteristically optimistic:

A startup without competition is like a rapper without a rival. It's just awkward.—
Aaron Levie (@levie) September 11, 2012

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Cloud computing 2012: a pessimist’s guide

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 06:13:29 +0000

How does the cloud market for the next year look? There will be no silver linings or lemonade. This research note, part of GigaOM Pro’s outlook for 2012, examines startups’ chances to challenge traditional enterprise IT practices, cloud pricing models, the true state of federated clouds, and how IT jobs will change in the coming months. Expect plenty of defensive M&A, cloud lock-in, phantom data discovery, outages, availability headaches, pricing confusion and job displacement over the next 12 months.

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Okta unlocks access to the corporate cloud

Colleen Taylor — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 20:50:27 +0000

Okta, a startup that makes identity and access management software for enterprises, has closed $16.5 million in new funding, which it may need since VMware earlier this year announced it, too, would get in on this space. San Francisco-based Okta says it will put the money toward “an aggressive growth strategy” in the months ahead.

Single sign-on (SSO) solutions like Okta’s have become increasingly attractive to the enterprise as businesses continue to put more data in the cloud and have employees accessing them from multiple devices. Instead of running programs on a single “work” machine, many employees nowadays bring tablets, phones, laptops and other devices into the workplace, or perform work while they are on the go.

Okta’s software enables multiple people within an enterprise to sign in to the company’s web-based applications, whether they’re in the cloud or behind a firewall, while employers control employee access to programs through an app market-style interface. In May 2011, VMWare entered the space with a product called Horizon, which is billed as a “user-centric management service for accessing cloud applications.”

Okta launched publicly in January 2011, and its customers currently range from Internet radio company Pandora to oil pipeline giant T.D. Williamson. The new funding round brings Okta’s total venture capital investment to approximately $27 million. The company’s investors now include Greylock Partners, Khosla Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and Floodgate.

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Single Sign-On Simplifies App Management and Access

Gary Orenstein — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 19:30:00 +0000

As we adopt more and more cloud Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications for work, keeping track of those logins and passwords becomes a real pain. For companies, knowing which employees have access to which services and which content becomes a security, compliance and operations nightmare.

Fortunately, a crop of companies are eager to solve the problem with single sign-on (SSO) solutions, which provide dashboards that allow administrators to add and configure SaaS applications for an entire workforce. Users get the simplicity of a single access point for all their web applications, and companies can easily set and track policies.

Another feature companies relish is integration with Active Directory, the de facto standard from Microsoft in enterprise identity management that allows administration of roles and assignments for individuals and their access credentials.

Here are a few contenders in this cloud SaaS management arena including their self-described categories:

Okta: identity and access management software. Okta, which recently hit the scene following a $10 million investment from Andreesen Horowitz this past summer, promotes the concept of a Cloud Area Network, described as a collection of on-demand services.
OneLogin: single sign on for the cloud and SaaS. OneLogin, funded by Charles River Ventures and Redpoint Ventures, also fits directly in this arena. The company claims to have over 900 pre-integrated applications and offers a free plan for a single user, as well as paid group plans.
ProtectNetwork: cloud-based e-credential management service. ProtectNetwork is a product of 9 Star Research, a company started in 2002 and likely familiar with e-credential management software before the cloud came along. They now have ProtectNetwork as an online, hosted offering for identity management.
Conformity: cloud identity and SaaS management solutions. Based in Austin, Texas, Conformity is backed by Guggenheim Venture Partners. The company has a thorough website on SaaS identity management issues, as well as some clever marketing as the anti-SSO SSO. Go figure.

On the surface, a managed single sign-on solution for companies seems like a no-brainer. (I expect there are other companies I missed in the roundup). But there’s a bigger issue and opportunity here, in my opinion: Rather than merely managing the sign-ons and security, these services could back a step to the selection of SaaS applications themselves.

SSO providers can aggregate the menu of applications at each company and the amount of application use. Combine that with clever polling of customers’ favorite applications, and you start to build a database where pattern-matching across companies (anonymously) could drive SaaS sales. The metadata about the applications becomes more valuable, in my opinion, than the service of managing the sign-ons.

Perhaps these SSO providers give birth to enterprise SaaS app stores. Customers will like the fact that they can benchmark and see patterns of application use amongst peers, and SaaS providers could benefit from a direct-line sales and marketing channel. No doubt there are still plenty of short-term sign-on challenges to solve, but if SaaS sign-ons are the enterprise check-in, I think we’ll see these SSO providers expanding to other interesting territory soon.

Gary Orenstein is host of The Cloud Computing Show.

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