Okta Customer Research Finds Office 365 Most Used Cloud Service

As a cloud identity management service, Okta collects tons of data about how its customers use other cloud products. Today it released its first Okta Business @ Work Report. Among the many compelling findings was that Microsoft’s Office 365 was the favorite cloud service overall so far this year.

Okta is not alone in using the data it collects to generate reports. ZenDesk puts out aquarterly report based on customer service data running through its systems. In fact, last year I wrote an article, Actually Every Company Is A Big Data Company with the idea being that data is an artifact of simply doing business. These companies are acknowledging and formalizing that notion by sharing the data with customers.

The company found that it was using this type of data to decide where to concentrate its resources, CEO Todd McKinnon told TechCrunch. “We used data to see what apps people were using and the frequency of usage and then made integrations to those [most popular] things the best,” he said.

With 2500 customers using over 4000 cloud applications, he said the amount of data was such that it made sense to generate a report and share it. He acknowledges that this is a snapshot of his customer base and may not always correlate with the world at large, but it does present an intriguing picture of how Okta customers are using the cloud.

Some Interesting Findings

Okta has been tracking app usage since 2012 and for most of that time, Salesforce.com has held a firm lead in usage statistics, but over the last year Office 365 which has been climbing steadily finally surpassed it with Box coming in third, according to the report.

Cloud app usage data from 2012 to 2015. The top 3 today are Office 365, Salesforce and Box.

You’ve probably been hearing about Slack, the increasingly popular corporate messaging app. Not surprisingly, it leads app growth over the last quarter with a 50 percent increase. More unexpected, PagerDuty, a tool for managing IT incident information was second with 25.5 percent growth. SurveyMonkey, the online survey service was third at 23.5 percent.

Okta app survey data. Top growing companies over last quarter. Slack, PagerDuty and SurveyMonkey comprise the top three.

The average number of stand-alone cloud apps in place at Okta customers is between 11 and 16, and this is true across a range of company sizes, the report found. This was a number that ended up surprising McKinnon who expected it to be much lower, he said.

The report even looked at tablet usage and found the top three tablet users by industry were pharma, biotech and education. Meanwhile, education and retail were the top industries when it came percentage of users logging in using a mobile device.

Since Okta is an identity management company, a report from them wouldn’t be complete without some security details and the company found that multi-factor authentication (MFA) has been on the increase with Amazon Web Services, Salesforce.com and Office 365, the top three services when it comes to MFA implementation.

The report was based on anonymized data from 2500 customers, running 4000 applications (with thousands of additional custom integrations) with millions of daily authentications from 185 countries.

The report looked at many other details such as popularity of apps by industry, region and other pieces. McKinnon said that he could see a day when they look for a way to charge for this information, but for now, the report is free.

Comments

How ad-free subscriptions could solve Facebook

At the core of Facebook’s “well-being” problem is that its business is directly coupled with total time spent on its apps. The more hours you pass on the social network, the more ads you see and click, the more money it earns. That puts its plan to make using Facebook healthier at odds with its finances, restricting how far it’s willing to go to protect us from the harms of over use. The advertising-supported model comes with some big benefits, though. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly said that “We will always keep Facebook a free service for everyone.” Ads lets Facebook remain free for those who don’t want to pay, and more importantly, for those around the world who couldn’t afford to. Ads pay for Facebook to keep the lights on, research and develop new technologies, and profit handsomely in a way that attracts top talent and further investment. More affluent users with more buying power in markets like the US, UK, and Canada command higher ad prices, effectively...

Engineering against all odds, or how NYC’s subway will get wireless in the tunnels

Never ask a wireless engineer working on the NYC subway system “What can go wrong?” Flooding, ice, brake dust, and power outages relentlessly attack the network components. Rats — many, many rats — can eat power and fiber optic cables and bring down the whole system. Humans are no different, as their curiosity or malice strikes a blow against wireless hardware (literally and metaphorically). Serverless software deployment to the cloud, this is not. New York City officially got wireless service in every underground subway station a little more than a year ago, and I was curious what work went into the buildout of this system as well as how it will expand in the future. That curiosity is part of a series of articles I’ve written on an observed pattern known as cost disease, the massively inflating costs of basic human services like health care, housing, infrastructure, and education. The United States spends trillions of dollars on each of these fields, massively outspending sim...

South Korea aims for startup gold

Back in 2011, when South Korea won its longshot bid to host the 2018 Winter Olympics, the country wasn’t widely recognized as a destination for ski and snow lovers. It wasn’t considered much of a tech startup hub either. Fast forward seven years and a lot has changed. For the next 10 days, the eyes of the world will be on the snowy slopes of PyeongChang. Meanwhile, a couple of hours away in Seoul, a burgeoning startup scene is seeing investments multiply, generating exits and even creating a unicorn or two. While South Korea doesn’t get a perfect score as a startup innovation hub, it has established itself as a serious contender. More than half a billion dollars annually has gone to seed through late-stage funding rounds for the past few years. During that time, at least two companies, e-commerce company Coupang and mobile-focused content and commerce company Yello Mobile, have established multi-billion-dollar valuations. To provide a broader picture of how South Korea stacks ...

Trump cites Facebook exec’s comments downplaying Russian ad influence on election

You’d be forgiven for missing Donald Trump’s multiple retweets of Facebook executive Rob Goldman over the weekend. Perhaps you were spending time with family, watching Black Panther or just attempting to forget politics for a moment by ignoring the manic flurry of social media updates from the leader of the free world. But in amongst a deluge of tweets that blamed Democrats for failing to preserve DACA, called out the FBI over the recent school shooting in Florida on the FBI and affectionately referred to a member of congress as “Liddle’ Adam Schiff, the leakin’ monster of no control,” the President cited Facebook’s VP of Ads as evidence against claims that his campaign colluded with Russia. “The Fake News Media never fails,” Trump tweeted over the weekend. “Hard to ignore this fact from the Vice President of Facebook Ads, Rob Goldman!” Trump was citing Goldman’s own Twitter dump over the past week, responding to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s recent indictment of 13 Russian...

3D printing company New Matter is shutting down this month

Perhaps 2014 wasn’t the ideal time to get into the 3D printing game. After years of hype, the even the biggest names have been struggling to stay afloat. Pasadena startup New Matter is joining the growing list of companies who’ve unsuccessfully made a go at it, announcing that it will be closing up shop by the end of the month. It’s not for lacking of trying — and the company’s MOD-t printer was met with decent reviews when it launched in 2016. In his writeup, John praised the pricing ($300 or $400, depending on where you picked one up) and ease of use, though added cautiously, “you get what you pay for.” Initially funded on Indiegogo, the company went back to the crowdfunding well last year, this time taking to Kickstarter to pay for a Model 2. The project managed to exceed its goal in five days, but New Matter still pulled the plug. The company says it ultimately wanted to go back to the drawing board. “We have always strived to listen closely to our customers’ feedback, and...

Exciting Technology

Search This Blog