US-headquartered Okta, a cybersecurity company focused on Identity Access Management, has grown its India workforce threefold in the last year to 300 employees. The $12.4 billion company, with a global workforce of nearly 6,000 across 23 countries, intends to reach 500 employees in India by the end of 2025, making it the largest workforce outside of the US.
“When we started our journey in India a year ago, we looked at two major pillars in terms of operations - being in India and building our capability by leveraging India’s engineering, finance, and operations talent to build out as a Centre of Excellence (COE) globally for Okta,” Ben Goodman, SVP & General Manager APJ at Okta told businessline, announcing plans of hiring across Mumbai, Delhi and Bengaluru.
Okta is hiring for roles across engineering, finance, operations, global marketing, and HR in India. “It’s a microcosm of our global operations and we’re seeing that team deliver some real innovations. Some technologies announced last year at Okta around our AI platform, things like policy recommender, governance analyser, identity threat protection, and log investigator, all foundational pillars of our core Okta platform, have been built and engineered in India by our teams here,” Goodman said.
He said India is probably the only other place globally where the company has in effect every headquarter type function operating. “The talent here - engineering and product - is exceptional. The level of degrees, certifications, and experience helps us accelerate the time to market for products. Insight from our Indian customers on the more extreme end of scale and requirements also help us contribute to our engineering functions.”
Having the right engineering talent and local customers to help Okta drive the innovation scale is a unique combination that only really exists in India as a global market, he said. “We see the Indian population growing both in terms of its contribution to company functions, but also scaling to support the market here.”
In India, the company is working with some of the country’s largest airlines to transform their customer journey, as well as large online makeup and beauty products brands. Indian tech companies in the AI and customer loyalty space use Okta technology for their employees to build up strong security and technology capability and streamline their customer journey and experience, he said.
The strongest sectors are the Indian and global airline tourism industry where Okta is seeing an uptick among brands looking to both better support their staff and accelerate their customer journey experience, with mobile app and website transformation for a more integrated customer journey.
The company is also seeing growth in the manufacturing sector, with large manufacturing companies acquiring smaller ones. Okta enables organisations to rapidly ingest technology from acquisitions faster.
“Some of India’s largest manufacturing firms use us for workforce and rapid integration. M&A readiness, or the ability of companies to radically accelerate the time to technologically ingest an acquisition, is a big use case. It is pulling M&A integrations from 12 months, in some cases down to 30 days to completely ingest a company,” he said.
In the retail beauty online, e-commerce space, brands have many suppliers, marketing agencies, and logistics agencies and deal with employees not legally part of their company, but have access to critical systems. Okta is helping them manage their extended workforce and partnerships. It has around 18,400 global customers.
Alongside, Okta Ventures, its private equity arm, has made investments in Southeast Asia in companies like Privy, out of Indonesia, and k-ID, out of Singapore. “At any point in time, we’re evaluating a couple of 100 firms for investment. We’re definitely looking at investments in India and will likely announce in the near future because there’s too many good things happening here for us to not be involved.”