“One of the things powering our growth too is that more and more technology leaders and people in the security industry and customers and users are understanding the importance of identity,” says Okta CEO Todd McKinnon. “They’re going from a world where they were thinking about cloud computing, firewalls, and VPNs, and now they’re thinking about identity as being the central platform to really embrace the cloud, create a great digital experience for customers, and also keep it all secure.”

Todd McKinnon, CEO of Okta, discusses how identity has become the central platform for companies to embrace the cloud in an interview with Jim Cramer on CNBC:

We Have 6,550 Happy Customers Across the Entire Globe

We have 6,550 happy customers across the entire globe. We come to work every day making sure that we make them secure, make them successful, and help them adopt cloud and transform their businesses. One example is Major League Baseball. We do a couple of very important things for MLB. The first is that we help their employees log into the applications they need in order to be productive at work. They can log in securely and with a very positive simple user experience.

The second thing, which is more recent, is we are the login system and the security layer for MLB.com. If you’re logging in and streaming those baseball games you’re logging in through Okta to get to MLB.com. It’s really helpful for them because that they can take their awesome developer and engineering talent and focus it on building core parts of that application and that experience versus the security parts that we can do better.

To Deliver Trusted Technology You Have To Start With Identity

Zoom (a customer of Okta) is a great company with another great product experience. They’ve revolutionized a market a lot of people thought was really entrenched with a lot of competitors. They came out with a better product and its results are kind of speaking for themselves. What we’re seeing in our business and it’s really driving these results you’re seeing is that every organization from sports league like MLB.com to a university like Seton Hall to the largest enterprises in the world, financial institutions and governments, they all have to connect more closely and more securely with the people in their ecosystem.

Whether that’s students or alumni or faculty or employees or customers, what’s at the center of all that interaction is technology. If you want to talk about trusted technology and delivering that to people you have to start with identity. That’s what we’re doing for all these organizations around the world and that’s what’s powering our results.

Identity Is the Central Platform For Companies To Embrace the Cloud

It’s a really important role we’re playing. If you think about it, especially in the case of Zscaler, companies are moving away from the old world, which was they had a firewall around their network and everything inside was secure and everything outside was blocked. Now they’re moving to this world called Zero Trust which means they basically don’t trust anything. They want to verify everything. When you have to verify everything you have to have this passport, you have to have this digital identity, and that’s we’re providing. For a lot of companies, we’re turning a world that’s pretty daunting in terms of how you give this flexibility or this openness and making it secure and very simple to use.

One of the things powering our growth too is that more and more technology leaders and people in the security industry and customers and users are understanding the importance of identity. They’re going from a world where they were thinking about cloud computing, firewalls, and VPNs, and now they’re thinking about identity as being the central platform to really embrace the cloud, create a great digital experience for customers, and also keep it all secure. It’s that mindset and that consciousness in the market of the importance of identity as a platform that is really leading people to come to Okta and driving our results.

Our businesses are global of course. We don’t have as much exposure to China as other companies have but in an indirect way, we’re helping companies of every organization across the entire world be successful with their businesses as well. We do think about powering business globally. So it’s in everyone’s interest I think to have as much free trade and as much economic commerce as possible. Indirectly, we do benefit from that, so we have a close eye on that as well.