Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news, aws services are back
Speaker 1: up and running. This morning's outage underscoring though the needs
Speaker 1: for cybersecurity, I'll enter Octa as one player. The company
Speaker 1: says it's business has grown alongside the acceleration of cloud services.
Speaker 1: It now says it's on the lookout for rising AI
Speaker 1: enabled threats. Joining me now is Tom McKennon, Octa CEO. Look,
Speaker 1: anyone can have an outage, but if you're providing cloud
Speaker 1: sources for thirty percent of you know, Corporate America and beyond,
Speaker 1: it's a little concerning. What went through your head when
Speaker 1: you saw this this morning?
Speaker 2: Todd Well, I think about the world as layered into
Speaker 2: different critical services. Cloud infrastructure is one critical service, and
Speaker 2: as the lean, independent, neutral identity company, we're building this
Speaker 2: identity service for the entire world, whether that's enterprises, whether
Speaker 2: that's consumers, whether that's people building AI agents. We want
Speaker 2: to be that identity infrastructure. It's important for CyberSecure, it's
Speaker 2: important for business continuity, and it has to be reliable.
Speaker 1: So how do you make sure that it's reliable.
Speaker 2: Then a lot of redundancy and a lot of focus
Speaker 2: and a lot of making sure we do exactly what
Speaker 2: customers expect, whether it's backups, redundancy, and monitoring it continuously.
Speaker 2: It's very important for us.
Speaker 1: Now you are growing very very substantially. What you've ate
Speaker 1: other people in San Francisco and how.
Speaker 2: Many thousand around the world, six thousand global employees doing
Speaker 2: a great job for our customers every day.
Speaker 1: Well love to hear it, and how I hope they are.
Speaker 1: How fast are you adding customers? And what's your pitch
Speaker 1: versus another security identity security company?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's an interesting perspective we have, and there's different
Speaker 2: perspectives on. Some vendors want to sell you everything across
Speaker 2: the entire application and platform stack. Some vendors want to
Speaker 2: sell you everything across cybersecurity. We focus on identity, and
Speaker 2: we focus on verifying who the people are in your company,
Speaker 2: who the people are coming to your website as customers
Speaker 2: or prospects, and now really with AI agents, we make
Speaker 2: sure that that identity service is continuous across everything you're
Speaker 2: trying to automate in your business with AI too, and
Speaker 2: that's our focus. And beyond that, we focus on connecting
Speaker 2: to everything else in the technology stack and letting our
Speaker 2: customers choose what they want to use.
Speaker 1: What is the scale of AI agents Okta expects in
Speaker 1: the next twelve months.
Speaker 2: It's starting out very strong, but it's going to be
Speaker 2: growing significantly. When you think about what companies can automate
Speaker 2: with these AI agents, how they can improve their top
Speaker 2: line revenue, how they can cut costs, how they can
Speaker 2: be more efficient, how they can serve their customers better,
Speaker 2: it's got tremendous potential.
Speaker 1: What about your exposure to chat GPT user growth? You
Speaker 1: know how much of that you have and how is
Speaker 1: it changing how you do business?
Speaker 2: Well, I think chat GPT is the perfect example of
Speaker 2: how much can be automated with AI. And when every
Speaker 2: company looks at that, they think, hey, we can make
Speaker 2: our customer experience better with adding chat GPT like capabilities,
Speaker 2: we can make our employees more productive. So it's really
Speaker 2: driving them to deploy, to deploy, to deploy, deploy more
Speaker 2: AI technology, and that means more identity is required. Those
Speaker 2: connections have to be secure, those connections have to be reliable.
Speaker 2: So it's really an exciting time for the industry.
Speaker 1: Is it still in the land grab phase? And if
Speaker 1: that's the case, which I think I think it is,
Speaker 1: then how do you make sure that you're the one
Speaker 1: doing the grabbing.
Speaker 2: Well, I think it's really important that everyone understands how
Speaker 2: important identity management is to rolling up AI and AI agents.
Speaker 1: I mean they only need one person to manage their identity, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Well, it's important that the identity service connects to everything.
Speaker 2: It connects to every application in the back end, every
Speaker 2: development platform. One of the things about AI agents particularly
Speaker 2: is how you build these things is changing very rapidly.
Speaker 2: So we give our customers the ability to make sure
Speaker 2: they have security, governance and visibility, and then let them
Speaker 2: choose the rapidly evolving platforms behind the scenes to whatever
Speaker 2: fits their needs. That's really core to everything we do,
Speaker 2: that choice and that flexibility.
Speaker 1: What did the Google wiz palaw All to cyber Arc
Speaker 1: deal mean.
Speaker 2: For you, Well, it's a different worldview. I think companies
Speaker 2: try to consolidate around everything in cyber We think that
Speaker 2: that's not the right approach. We think the right approach
Speaker 2: is to consolidate on identity because it preserves the choice
Speaker 2: of other cyber tools for customers. They're not locked into
Speaker 2: one endpoint tool or one network security tool. They can
Speaker 2: choose whatever is best for their business. And we'll keep
Speaker 2: them more secure, especially as the thread environment is rapidly evolving.
Speaker 2: The ability to choose the best cyber tool and not
Speaker 2: be locked into a stack from one monolithic vendor is
Speaker 2: very powerful and it's resonating with our customers. They cut
Speaker 2: costs and standardize their identity workflows and use cases around Octa,
Speaker 2: and then choose everything else around the rest of cyber
Speaker 2: to best fit their needs.
Speaker 1: All right, well, thank you so much for coming in today.
Speaker 1: Told that is Todd McKinnon, CEO of Octa