Okta, Inc. (OKTA) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. I appreciate it. Welcome, everyone, late afternoon here. I appreciate you guys being with us. So pleased to be joined by the Okta team. So we have Eric Kelleher, and we'll get to you in a second and talk about that recent promotion. So glad to have you here in your new role and be with us. And then Dave Gennarelli with IR. Dave, I appreciate you've always been supportive.

Thanks for having us.

So Eric, I wanted to let you kind of give yourself an intro and give some background to yourself. This might be some people's first interaction or having conversations with you. So would love to just let people kind of know some of your background.

Sure. That's great. My name is Eric Kelleher, the recently appointed Chief Operating Officer for Okta. I've been with the company about 8.5 years. I've been in Software-as-a-Service since the late '90s before we called it Software as a Service. But my background has been in building customer businesses. So I grew up building professional services, introduced the customer success management function to the industry at Salesforce as part of the team that built the Salesforce enterprise SaaS playbook, spent 11 years there until 2013 and then did a quick tour at LinkedIn, setting up their Customer Success Function for their Talent Solutions Business before joining Okta back in 2016. So I've been with Okta through the phases of growth and through some recent quarters that have been growing a little bit less enthusiastically. But in my tenure at Okta, I've stepped from customer functions into more operating functions. A couple of years ago, I picked up our marketing and communications teams. And now with this appointment, which just started this month, I picked up our go-to-market StratOps team and our BT teams and our company operation teams as well. So I'm very excited to be here today. I appreciate the invite.

Yes. So it's a pleasure to see kind of you guys exiting the year with a strong execution, starting the year strong on looking into fiscal '26. So just curious what you guys were most pleased with when you look back on this quarter.

Let me just start that. I think we felt we had a really strong quarter. It was stronger than we expected. And we were really pleased to see the execution, in particular, in the go-to-market in closing out the pipeline of business that we had built for the quarter. We've been working very intently all year in 3 priorities for the year. So our 3 corporate priorities last year, first was always secure, and we had some work to do a year ago in reestablishing trust and a baseline of security with our customers. We put a lot of work last year into making sure that we restored trust where we needed to. Our second priority was reigniting growth. And we put a lot of work into our go-to-market and our strategy and operations, our enablement, our execution and building pipeline and getting good return on investment on our pipeline. And number three for us was scale. And as we look across our Q4 results, we feel we closed in a strong position. From a security perspective, Q4 was the quarter where we overtook the #1 identity brand in brand awareness as Okta, which is exciting for us to see that. We had a number of metrics on our contribution with our partners and our partner engagement. Our bookings metrics across the board, and we ran them in our earnings call, were stronger than we had expected. So it was great to see all that. And then we also saw from a scale perspective, you saw from a free cash flow perspective and a profitability perspective, we were able to deliver on that front as well. So for us, Q4 really demonstrated our ability to execute from a position of strength, and it sets us up for this year. And we have a lot of -- we're not done. We have a lot of work to do this year. We're starting FY '26 with a significant change in our go-to-market to further specialize our sellers and bring them to market, and we're working through the change associated with that, and our guidance reflects what we expect that to take. But we're very confident in our ability to go forward next year. So curious for you Q4...

Dave, you have anything to add or...

No, other than, as Eric said, it's kind of strength across the board. So not any one particular area that drove it, but pleased to see just a record amount of bookings, over $1 billion of total bookings in the quarter, strength in new products, strength in the Auth0 business, record quarter for the Auth0 business. So by and large, yes, it was one of our better quarters.

Yes. So I mean, it was great to see strong execution to end the year and build on 3Q, that was a solid quarter as well. I guess just to -- I don't know, to discuss the thing that's on everybody's mind is just like how do we get comfort with consistent execution out of Okta. I mean there's been some challenges, and you guys rightfully acknowledge that. But just what it gives you -- or how can you help give investors confidence that like we can expect this consistent pace of execution going forward?

Yes. I think if you look back at our history of hitting and beating, like that's been something that we've been -- we try to guide prudently based upon how we see the business and our ability to execute for growth. I think you just hit on, not only was Q4 strong, but we saw good progress in Q3. For us, that demonstrates our ability to build the year towards our goal and land in a position of strength, which we executed. We feel good about that as well. And I think as you look across the financial metrics we've shared over the past many quarters, you've seen our free cash flow continue to improve. We've demonstrated we can be profitable. And you've now seen us guide that we are investing into growth to make sure we're getting growth back to where the potential of the market says we should be. So as I said, we -- and one of the things we've learned this year is we -- one of the steps we took in go-to-market this year was to partially specialize a segment of our sales organization. We took our small business sales team in North America and separated into a group of hunters focused on new logo acquisition and a group of farmers focused on cross-selling and upselling. And that change that we invested in throughout the year ended up in us having a very strong performance in that segment in Q4 as well. And we're taking that further by further specializing by product line and by buyer coming into this year. So we're confident in our ability to manage through change and the lead through change and to deliver. And we're also confident in our ability to forecast and guide based on what we expect the cost of that change to be and how we execute this year.

Yes. Great. So let's talk about a lot of the expansion opportunity here because it's really exciting what you guys are doing and to see you go execute against this broader platform opportunity in several different ways. So big picture, where do you think we are in terms of customers' willingness and ability to adopt the platform and actually have these swim lanes start to blur in identity?

We see strong readiness in customers. In fact, we're -- we didn't set out to build what we are now calling a unified identity platform, a unified secure identity fabric, that wasn't Okta's initial design. Okta's initial design was specifically to focus on access management and be the best in business in access management. And what's happened over the years is our customers have pulled us into these other areas. They pulled us into privileged access, and we brought a product to market called Advanced Server Access to service that market. They pulled us into governance, and we started with a product called Lifecycle Management. We then added a product called Workflows to start to service that. Even then, this is 3, 4 years ago, our strategy was to partner with SailPoint and Saviynt as full stack governance systems. But what's happened is our customers have had success with Okta. They've had success with all of our products, and they have asked us to Okatafy these adjacencies in a way that they could administer them in a fashion where they know that they're secure, they know they can get great time to value, they know they can get ROI and they know that they can trust the partner they're working with in those areas. And so that's what's led us to bring what we now have Okta Identity Governance and Privileged Access to market. You heard us talk in Q4 about the success we've had with Identity Governance. It's now 2 years in the market. We have just crossed 1,300 customers. I had mentioned SailPoint. It took SailPoint about 10 years to get to the same customer milestone. We feel pretty good about our ability to build our footprint into that space. And the feedback from the customers has been really validating. We have now -- in the deals where we're attaching governance to workforce deals, it's about 30% of the contract value. And we've had success upmarket probably faster than we initially would have expected as customers who are being -- having great success with our workforce suite are asking us to add governance to that suite to help them secure identity. And we expect Privileged Access to follow. It's earlier. It's a year newer than governance. Its first year looks very similar to the path that we saw for governance as well. So we're optimistic on that front.

Yes, that's great. So I mean, I think a lot of people are excited about IGA and what that can mean for growth for this year. So where you're finding success? It feels like from a logo perspective, maybe it's mid-market. And to me, I think mid-market is probably a pretty decent greenfield opportunity and surprising kind of the brand name logos you talk to and they say, hey, we run on spreadsheets. And somebody mentioned they use Alteryx and GUI to kind of do some life cycle stuff on stuff. So it's still surprising like how greenfield is. So maybe speak to the greenfield opportunity and where you're finding success in the enterprise segment. Is this full displacements? Is this certain workloads, certain environments? Is it in some way a wrapper around existing solutions? So just many facets talking about.

I would say we're not seeing a huge volume of outright replacements of existing on-prem stack for governance as an example. I think where we tend to get involved is more as an extension of the existing Okta suite, which is what we expected. And where we do compete head-to-head with larger on-prem systems or transitioning to SaaS systems as in the case of the 2 companies we talked about, it tends to be as an adjacent purchase. So customers that are using the Okta platform for access management that are considering adding governance and they might look at 2 of us head-to-head. But it's -- we're not seeing outright replacements as a go-to-market play we're processing and volume yet. I expect we will get there. Again, we're relatively early in the journey at 2 years in, but we're very optimistic. We've crossed -- we mentioned on our earnings call, we've crossed 1,300 customers, as I said. That business is now a $100 million ARR business just for that product. And the 2 related technologies we have that do governance-related work are life cycle management and workflows. We've had them in market for several years and combined, they're an additional $300 million of ARR. So right there in the governance space, we today have a business that's doing about $400 million in ARR, which makes us -- gives us credible capabilities to compete with full stack offers as well.

Yes. Dave, are we talking about growth of that IGA business in totality?

Talk to the growth of that?

Yes.

So yes, it's been one of our fastest growing when we talk about the new product bucket. So that's growing over -- that compromised over 20% of our total bookings in Q4. So that's an acceleration even off of Q3 where that bucket was about 15% of total bookings. And then think about Q4 is our biggest volume quarter any given year. So yes, it's the strength of that and it's really the other products that are within that bucket like Privileged Access, Identity Threat Protection with Okta AI, Secure Identity Posture Management, Fine Grained Authorization. So all those actually had meaningful contribution as well. Identity Governance is easily the biggest component, but those other ones actually had really strong performance as well.

Yes. So 20% this quarter, 15% prior quarter. Anything about a year ago, just to help people understand.

So a year ago, they were all fairly small. So the growth rate is pretty considerable. So I felt like the actual contribution to bookings is probably a better metric to measure the success.

One thing I thought that was really interesting and important, what Todd said on the earnings call on Monday, the go-lives seem to be quick go-lives because I think that's a big thing in IGA is like the amount of GSI dollars that are needed and the time and people spend decade -- like a decade trying to implement IGA. So I think quick go-live is a big thing. So can you talk like quantitatively and qualitatively what you're seeing in terms of go-live and how quickly customers are getting successful?

Yes. And what -- I mentioned earlier that what our customers have asked is for us to help [ Oktafy ] the governance space. That's a big part of it. A big part of our value proposition since we were founded. Because we're cloud native, we're only in the cloud. It's relatively quick to provision us. And our entire design as a company for our stack has been helping people get time to value quickly, get live quickly and get value and then add more capabilities over time. We've -- so that has been our approach to governance as well. So today, we have customers that are deploying -- of the 1,300 customers, we have customers that have gone live in a couple of weeks. We have customers that have gone live in a handful of months. We don't have any years long or 10-year long deployments. Our product is only 2 years old. So we feel very -- the feedback we're getting from our customers is very much in line with their expectations that when they make the investment with us, they want to solve a problem now, get a system up and running quickly and get value and they want the ability to add more complexity to that over time. And which is kind of inverted from the historical model of designing an on-prem governance system where you spend, as you said, years or 10 years with the GSI to get it designed properly, set up properly. And then once it's deployed, it's already too complex for you to figure out how to administer and too expensive for you to figure out how to maintain. We're kind of the -- we have SaaSified that entire approach to solving governance. So we think that's a big reason why we're seeing the success that we're seeing right now.

Yes. I mean I think that's the opportunity you guys came up with SSO MFA and filled a big void with a cloud-based prescriptive out-of-the-box solution. I think that's what IGA still needs. So maybe adjusting topics a little bit, and we can kind of tackle this in 2 parts, but just would love to get your perspective on what customers are thinking about asking for and how you're positioning Okta when it comes to nonhuman identities, Agentic AI. Just I know we covered some of this on the earnings call, but love to just hear your perspective a little bit at a high level, and we don't want to get too tactical on.

Yes, it's still very early for the space overall and for everyone. Todd talked about how we're thinking about this on the earnings call on Monday. But I think a couple of broad comments that are relevant in understanding Okta as a company. One is our seat-based pricing model, all of our workforce identity stack is seat-based. Historically, it's been limited based on the number of humans you have. Adding agents into the mix adds new opportunity for us to think about how we price our products. And some companies are looking at pricing on an MAU basis, which right now is our intent for our first offer that's coming out in for GenAI, which releases early access later this month. That will be priced on an MAU basis for early access. But we expect during that period to explore additional pricing models. And is there a transaction-based pricing model? Or is there a user-based pricing model that might make sense or an agent-based pricing model in that case. So we don't have a defined economic model for exactly how we approach pricing. We want to get some data from customers and usage before we lock in a particular pricing model for that. But we think it's opportunity for us and certainly for all the vendors that are in this space.

Yes. So in terms of thinking about the parts of the portfolio, the platform that you think benefit, I mean, if we think about the 4 big pillars, is it SIEM because that's where [ Auth ] for GenAI sits. But what about the rest of the portfolio? Do you think -- is there any particular area that you call out of, like, hey, this is the opportunity where we see best positioned to target the difference or not...

Yes, we see the SIEM, Auth0 platform for customer identity use cases with Auth for GenAI as the first area, which is why we're really accessing that first, but we see applicability across the board. So you can imagine from a workforce standpoint, you have a customer support rep who you authenticate your workforce identity access management. Well, that person might, in the future, have multiple agents that are also acting on their behalf and doing work on their behalf. They will then need a solution to authenticate each of those agents to make sure the code is what it says it is. And they will then also need Fine Grained Authorization that will designate not only that they know the agent is who they say it is, but also that the agent is able to do the things that it's trying to do. And so that combination of authentication and authorization is something that Okta has solved really well in our stack to date, and the opportunity becomes even larger when we start expanding beyond just humans that are taking action.

Will you have a freemium model to this? Because -- how are you thinking about pricing this and getting -- seeding the market out there, so like as developers are building that?

We have not announced a pricing model yet. So we're going to be exploring methods that we think are most successful for us. We do have a freemium model, if you will, for our customer identity business today where you can start with the free trial self-service and then grow up into an enterprise pricing plan over time. So that may be an approach that makes sense for us here. We'll find it out in the early months.

Yes. So I want to talk about the specialized sales force a little bit. And just -- want to understand better just why you're confident in this move, maybe in terms of what this looks like in practice for fiscal '26, some of the changes you're making and some of the data points that you have because you have some instances of specialization already. So data points or what you've seen to be successful and why you're confident that you can do this in other respects?

Yes, I think it's a great question. And one of the questions we've been getting is our guidance for this year, given Q4, is it conservative? How does that appear? And the cost of change is really one of the key drivers for why our guidance is where it is right now. We are putting a lot of effort into taking our sales organization and pulling it apart to have a focus on 2 distinct buying personas with the 2 parts of our technology stack, our Okta platform selling to IT and security and our Auth0 platform selling to developers. And we're very confident that, that direction is the direction that's going to accelerate sales productivity for us. Some of the data that we're looking at that is just we know that focus matters. We've spent the past couple of years taking sellers that have been successful in those platforms, pulling them together and asking everyone to sell everything to everyone. And what we've seen over the past couple of years as we look at our sales productivity numbers is that, that has not resulted in the kind of growth that we know we have the potential to achieve. And so we -- and in addition to that, during those 2 years, our products have been accelerating their pace of innovation. If you look back before 2 years, we were in a period where both Okta and Auth0 were replatforming. Okta, we were taking Okta from what we call its classic stack into what's now the Okta Identity Engine, the current architecture. Auth0 went from its legacy stack into what's now its current architecture called Layer0. So there was a period where we were focused on architectural changes, not so much feature innovation and product innovation for customers. We're through that now. And so we have sellers asking to sell everything while we have 2 R&D teams that are accelerating their pace of innovation and bringing more product to market while we're asking our sellers to focus on 2 distinct personas, in CIO, CISO and a developer with very different buying motions and very different priorities. We are very confident from everything that we've seen that focusing on the buyer with the stack is going to be the right move for us over time. And so we've designed that specialization as the primary investment we're doing this year. You asked about existing examples where we've tested specialization. This year, we had a similar but a distinct need that we were attacking, which was we were looking at our Americas commercial business. We had seen our pace of new logo acquisition start to decline as a percentage of bookings. And what we had seen is as our product innovation had picked up, it had gotten easier for salespeople to sell new products to their current customers than it was to go out and prospect for new -- for net new logos to bring into the business. So this year, we specialized that segment of our team to have a team of hunters that we're bringing in new logos and a team of farmers to cross-sell and upsell. And as you saw in our Q4 results, we felt very strongly with how that team ended up the year and building into that. So we're confident that last year's work built to the strength of close. The strength of close was -- it surprised us. It was bigger than we expected, which was great. But we are confident in the playbook that we have in place and where we're going. And the sales specialization is a really important strategic investment this year.

Right. So security organization, developer organization makes a ton of sense. Within workforce, is there a bifurcation between IGA and Access Management?

So where we bifurcate there is on our presale specialists, our sales engineers. So when we need specialists that are deep in domain expertise, we'll bring in technology specialists in those areas, but there will be 1 account owner for customers in IT and security across that entire portfolio.

Got it. And then we also talked about some packaging changes. So maybe talk about what the point of friction is that maybe you can alleviate with some of the packaging that you're rolling out.

We were talking about suites. We're rolling out something called Okta Suites for people that are buying the Okta platform components. So subsets of the SSO, MFA, Universal Directory, Lifecycle Management Workflows, OIG, Privileged Access, all those [ threat identify protection ], ISPM, all of those technologies are -- live in this Okta platform. And one of the areas of feedback we've gotten from customers is that it's a complicated product catalog to navigate. And one of the data points we've realized as we've looked at our sales execution is the complexity of that catalog has slowed down deal velocity. And so through those conversations and conversations with customers and analysts, we've realized that there's value for us in simplifying the bundling of products into suites that customers can subscribe to. We believe it will help transaction velocity. We also believe it will help us with renewals and helping customers get less myopically focused on individual line items and more focused on the big picture of how Okta is helping them solve their identity problems. Early feedback from the design of the suites has been very positive. So we're optimistic those will contribute this year as well.

Makes sense. And then another thing, I don't even know if you guys mentioned it, but partners was, I think [ standout ] to partner contribution.

And 70% of our deals in Q4 were partner influenced. 18 of our top 20 deals were partner influenced. We've seen really great traction with partner contribution. That's something we expect to continue as well.

Yes. I mean what's changed internally? Because I think it's maybe not been so symbiotic with the partner community in the years past, but I mean the GSIs are really contributing. And I think it's really coming to bear, and we're hearing it externally, too.

I think 2 things to talk about there, and Dave, you might have something to add as well. One is the GSIs have been more active this year. And a big part of that, that I hear in conversations with customers is their GSIs typically were involved in on-prem solutions, many of which have been -- have gone private and have road maps that are less certain for the moment. And so they've got to figure out how to navigate that. And the GSIs need to bet on a future partner that they have confidence. They're leaning into the cloud. So we're having larger customers working with larger SIs, having larger Okta conversations. That's been something that's been very material to our success upmarket. And then in addition to that, in mid-market and down market as well, we've had great success with AWS Marketplace. And as a channel for people transacting through the marketplace, we crossed -- in Q4, we crossed $1 billion in commerce on that platform in just the first 4 years that we've been listed. We were named the AWS Marketplace Partner of the Year. We've had great success. So we've had success down market through commerce channels. We've had success upmarket with the GSIs. We need to continue both of those. So there's still sustained execution that's required for us to capitalize on those opportunities. But we are optimistic that we're trending in the direction towards SaaS, towards identity in the cloud and towards the platform we're building.

Yes. And last thing I wanted to make sure we touch upon because I think it's really important. And again, talking about the earnings call, enterprise seems like the place where you're really focused. So help us understand or get incremental -- like the same amount of conviction that like the enterprise segment does have a lot of growth opportunity. Where do you see that? Is it new logos? Is it just you're underpenetrated in your existing installed base? Just big picture, like what gets you excited about this?

Yes. So it's not just enterprise, it's also Strat and PubSec. And what we're seeing is identity has never been a more strategic investment for firms to make. And as you look at cyber threat activity in the market right now, over 80% of attacks start with compromised credentials. And so serious companies are prioritizing securing identity more than they ever have. And so the program of making a bet on Okta and investing in Okta to address that problem has never been more important. So we see new logo opportunity with new companies that are upgrading legacy tech that they've outgrown so that they can attack that problem. And we also see opportunity with existing customers who are buying into our expanded portfolio as we continue to bring more products to market. So for us, both in enterprise and in strat, that's why we talked about our success in large customers greater than $100,000. Our $1 million customers have now grown to over $1 billion in ARR. We've had -- across the upmarket segment, we're seeing that kind of sustain.

I mean are we talking core workforce access management opportunity? Or are we talking the contribution in the enterprise where there's a lot of wallet share to be had in IGA, PAM, SIEM?

We're -- I'm sorry.

In core workforce, like access management, is there a lot of headway to go there? Or do you think the contribution...

We think both. We think there's an upsell opportunity with the core workforce products with more companies and more seats within the companies that are ordering in our portfolio. We have a sizable percentage of Fortune 500 and a sizable percentage of Global 2000, but we're not wall-to-wall in those organizations. So there's upside there. And then we additionally have a lot of cross-sell opportunity with the new products that we're bringing to market those products.

It's a confluence of what the technologies we have. So those bigger companies generally are much more complex. They have a mismatch of different identity systems. They bolt it together over the years. So they're bringing in Okta to modernize and simplify their platform. So -- and it doesn't happen in one fell swoop. So it's the land and expand strategy that we have that bring us in kind of whether it's proof of concept or maybe putting us into a particular environment, and we [ earn ] the right to expand that business over time that's been very successful.

Awesome. Well, I think we're out of time, but I really want to say thank you. Appreciate you guys being here.

Thanks, everyone. I appreciate it.