Office 365 Tops Salesforce as Most-Used Cloud Service
Office 365 is now the most-deployed cloud application in the world, beating Salesforce for the first time since Okta began tracking such usage in 2012. That's one of several striking findings about cloud application use revealed in the company's inaugural "Businesses @ Work Report," released today.
The report also found that a company's size no longer indicates how many cloud apps it might use, and that enterprise apps can quickly grow wildly popular . . . and can just as quickly lose ground in today's fast-evolving market. Companies are also surging in their uses of new Web sites, portals and other cloud-based applications to engage with customers, partners and contractors, Okta reported.
Okta, whose name comes from a meteorological term used to describe the extent of cloud coverage in the sky, provides identity management-as-a-service products to make it easier for businesses to manage login and authentication tasks on the Web. Founded in 2009 and led by co-founders Todd McKinnon, CEO, and Frederic Kerrest, COO, the company is based in San Francisco and serves customers that include Adobe, LinkedIn and Western Union.
Software Continues To 'Eat the World'
"Work is happening everywhere, and Okta has a unique vantage point into the cloud and mobile apps and services that organizations are choosing to help their employees, customers and partners be more flexible and productive," McKinnon said today in a post on the company's blog.
The new report looked at usage patterns among the 4,000 pre-integrated applications that Okta provides access to. Those apps include Amazon Web Services, Box, DocuSign, Dropbox, Office 365, Salesforce, Sharepoint Online, WebEx and Zendesk. The company said it manages millions of authentications and verifications for those apps around the world every day.
"As software continues to eat the world, we're seeing organizations of all sizes hungry to adopt the apps and services that will make them successful," the Okta report noted. "But creators of those apps and services will have to stay hungry, too. The rapid rise and fall of enterprise apps in our dataset shows that enterprise developers apps must stay highly valuable to stay relevant, similar to consumer app adoption trends."
'Users Can be Fickle'
While some enterprise software providers have maintained their leads in specialized uses -- Salesforce remains number-one in CRM , for example, and AWS continues to hold the top spot in infrastructure -- others have realized rapid changes in fortune. "Media darling" Slack, for instance, has seen usership grow by 50 percent between May and July of this year alone, while Yammer and ADP Portal, "are on the decline," according to Okta.
"Users can be fickle when it comes to app preference, gravitating towards what's new and shiny, and it would appear organizations are as well," the report noted.
Among the other findings in the Okta report:
After Office 365 and Salesforce, the most-used cloud apps are Box at number three, Google Apps in fourth place, Concur in fifth and Amazon Web Service in the sixth spot.
Most businesses, large and small, are using between 11 and 16 off-the-shelf cloud applications.
Over the past year, there has been a 40 percent increase in Okta customers using multi-factor authentication to secure at least one online app.
The use of standard security questions for verification has dropped by 14 percent since April 2014, while SMS for multi-factor authentication has grown by 9 percent.
More developers are creating apps that use the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) for authentication, and there are six times more SAML-enabled apps today than there were in 2013.