AI’s Impact on Customer Identity and Security with Okta’s Shiven Ramji

This is Textron tv. Hey everyone, welcome back here to another Textron TV interview. I'm really happy to introduce you to Shive or Shiv Ramji.

Shiv is the President of Customer Identity Cloud at Okta. Hey, Shi, welcome to Textron tv. Thanks for having me.

I'm excited to join you guys today. I really we're excited to have you on Shiv. Um, I mentioned you're the president of the Customer Identity Cloud at Okta, but, uh, you know, people may not know what that is, number one.

We're gonna talk about that at Okta, but before we do Shiv, give people a sense of kind of your story, your journey, if you will. Yeah, so I, uh, started out as a developer myself many, many years ago. And one of the first things I had worked on was, uh, building a single sign-on portal.

Uh, at the time I was an engineer and I was working for, uh, uh, in media research with Nielsen to build a single sound portal for the field. So I knew firsthand sort of what it takes to, for an engineer or developer to build identity. It's cumbersome, it's complex.

And then, you know, after that journey, I've sort of went on to, uh, uh, different companies of different sizes and even different industries where we were building products that were a downstream consumer or user of identity information. So whether it was advertising targeting, marketing, personalization, so on and so forth. Uh, and then got into cloud computing towards building products for developers at digital lotion.

And then after that, I joined, uh, auth Zero. And uh, I was really excited about that because I knew the problem of solving identity firsthand and the product made sense. So, joined that team, and now of course, you know, we are about over three years in, you know, we, we acquired, we got acquired into Okta, and I get to pursue the same, uh, mission now within, uh, the, uh, you know, the Okta umbrella.

Much bigger stage. Yes, absolutely. A lot more responsibilities and, and specifically with regards to the threat landscape, right?

Uh, it, it's, it's getting more complex and, um, threats are increasing at an alarming rate. So, yeah, absolutely. Uh, stakes are much higher now.

Yes, they are. They are. But you do have more resources, hopefully, uh, Shiv as we were talking, our, our audience knows Okta.

We've been, you know, tracking Okta here at Tech Trunk for many years. I think a lot of people think of, you know, single sign on identity, access control, et cetera. You know, to me, identity and access control is sort of the, the killer app in cloud security, right?

We don't worry as much about firewalls or intrusion prevention, but access control and identity as a part of that is really our, our choke point at, you know, for, for, uh, cloud security. For people who maybe are not familiar with the full breadth of Okta's offerings, and they are, if, and you don't have to take 10 minutes, but, you know, can you give us a kind of the shortened version? 'cause Okta has quite a lineup of offerings Yes.

Solutions. Yeah, we absolutely do. So hopefully everybody in the audience is mostly familiar.

I wouldn't assume everybody mostly familiar with, uh, Okta is the product that you use when you are, um, in your business or, uh, for, for work, basically. And, uh, that product essentially provides secure and seamless access for employees and contractors and business partners. So the idea is if you are working at a company, you're accessing SaaS applications, chances are, uh, uh, a big majority of them use Okta to access those applications securely.

So that use case is all about safe and secure access for, uh, employees, you know, contractors, business partners. Then there is the other market that we're also, uh, building products for, and it's commonly known as customer identity access management, or more commonly known as Siam. Uh, we love acronyms.

So we've got an acronym for everything. Siam is, is the, is the, is the, the other market. And there the two big use cases are we wanna provide secure and seamless access for consumer applications.

So this is your typical, I'm logging into my bank, my news website, my streaming, my loyalty accounts, um, I'm paying my mortgage, accessing insurance, anything you are as a consumer that you're using that has identity and security, we power those use cases. The second use case is essentially, um, secure and seamless access for your business customers. So in this case, we are providing capabilities to other companies and businesses who are then providing access, uh, to their, uh, applications.

Classic examples here tend to be your typical SaaS applications. IMA, uh, up and coming AI company. They'll build, um, their access controls and login systems using our product, and then they wanna make that product available to other businesses.

So that's the other use case that we, that we power. Excellent. And you spoke a little bit about what, you know, the you've been doing, and I just wanna make sure people realize what we say.

Customer identity cloud, they understand what that is. She, if you wouldn't mind. Yeah.

So customer INA cloud, we use that name and, and the brand really is AU zero. com. And it's a product that's really specifically built and tailored, uh, for, uh, for developers and, and engineers.

Because in the customer identity market, in most deployments, the engineers and developers are, uh, both either the, uh, the folks who choose the technology and also deploy it, or they're definitely the, uh, the, the folks who deploy, uh, chosen technologies when it comes to the customer identity project. So our product is tailored built to solve this for developers, in essence, making it so easy for them so they can integrate authentication and authorization into their applications easily. And they don't have to be identity experts because that's one less thing that they have to worry about, and they can really focus on innovation that matters and business differentiation that matters so they can launch their apps, uh, as fast as possible.

Excellent. Now, you guys have recently expanded the au zero, uh, capabilities over at Okta and, and helping developers, DevOps folks. Uh, why don't we, you know, talk about that.

I, I think Shiv the way that it makes sense to us though is maybe, you know, what was before, what was that baseline and what did, would it new capabilities here have been put in place? Yeah, so from the very early days, uh, of the company's founding, we've been obsessing on making it easy for developers to integrate authentication so they don't have to be experts. And I think maybe a little bit more context behind this is today we're asking developers to build products and experiences faster.

We were asking developers to do more, we're asking 'em to do it, uh, in a more cost effective way, and now we're making them responsible for security. So what we said was, what, what can we build so that we can take those, all of those burdens away? So that's how, uh, that's kind of the philosophy of the product that we built.

And we then we offer a, a very generous, free tier. So the classic example is you are a developer, you might have an idea for product in your mind, but you're not monetizing it yet. And, but you still want your idea to be out there for your prospective customers or existing customers to use an experience.

We want to enable that, and we wanna enable that, not just from the perspective making it easy for them to integrate and use, but we also wanna give them a lot of security capabilities. So what we've done with the new plans is we've increased the number of monthly active users a developer can get, uh, to 25,000. We've also added new security features such as passwordless, uh, authentication now is available in our, uh, free plan.

And we provide unlimited Okta connections and unlimited social connections so that they can, you know, um, take an I, you know, a product from idea all the way into production. Um, so they can test it out. Now, of course, as, as it's successful and as it starts scaling, then we do have self-service and enterprise paid plans that they can sort of might, um, upgrade to over time.

So I think that's really the, uh, the, the news here. And the one last thing I would talk about in the free plans is we also offer custom domains for free, uh, which tends to be a barrier. And we, we got a lot of feedback from developers that this really allows them to fully experiment with our product and go to market and see, uh, whether their product has legs and then it allows them to, to expand on from there.

Sure. So shiv sometimes free isn't free, or is that always free? Would this free offering, what are the, um, you know, is it time limited, size limited?

What is the, the governance? No, We, uh, well, it, it, i it's limited by certain, uh, features. So for example, um, we do have very specific, uh, uh, rate limit mutations.

We have owner APIs in our features in the free plan. 'cause we don't want customers to abuse them. So those are the, those are the gates that we have.

But outside of that, in terms of most of our features, we, we make sure that our customers can experience a full breadth and there is no expiration or credit or spend associated with it. Um, you can, we have customers who've been on our free tier for many, many years and they'll continue to, you know, to be there. Fantastic.

So it's free forever or forever anyway at this point. Yes. Now this is not a new business model, quite frankly, we've seen businesses with this model shiv.

Where is the point where people should say, you know what, the free is great, but I need more. What are the, what are the dials? So usually when, um, a custom when, um, one of our customers is starting to gain real traction, so when they go above 25,000 monthly active users is when they have to upgrade to a paid plan.

So that's one. Um, this is when you're building consumer experience, obviously, um, when it comes to building B2B applications, it tends to be, uh, how many different organizations you're trying to serve and how many different IDPs you're connecting to. So that tends to be the, the, the point where they need to move to a, a paid plan.

And these points are specific because they are clear indicators that a, an idea or a, or a developer pro a a product from a developer is finally gaining traction. So there is, it's a good indicator that, um, the company has some monetization in place and, uh, and once you do have a monetization in place, then it makes sense to have a paid offering and additional security capabilities and additional feature. So those are the, those are the signals we, we look for to, to, to tell us that, hey, this app is successful, so let's, uh, to a paid plan.

Okay, we got a little bit of time left. Yeah, sounds great. How do people engage?

What's the on-ramp here? Where, where did they go? What did they do?

How, you know, they wanna try it? Yeah, good news. com and you can sign up for, uh, our free product.

The other way to engage with us is recently also announced auth for Gen ai. Uh, you can sign up for a wait list. ai, you can sign up for a wait list.

Uh, and we also have another product called Dev portal. ai/dev portal and you can sign up for a a wait list. Um, there.

And just so I'm not letting, uh, the audience guessing what these products are. Essentially, we believe that there's gonna be lots of agents, um, that companies are going to be experimenting with and developing. But the concern is to put these, these agents and products into production, uh, they need robust, um, security and they need identity capability.

So what auth four Gen AI does is it allows developers to add authentication, uh, in, uh, into applications that are incorporating Gen AI provides finer grain permissions and also allows agents to, um, uh, to have a security contract with APIs because that's the, the, the mode of interaction. And so, um, so those are the things that we've, we've announced, uh, recently and, uh, are excited for the developer community to get engaged and, and play with the product and give us feedback. I love it.

Shiv, we're about outta time. I want to thank you for coming on here. Hey, now that you're here and you know the address, we expect to see more of you.

Keep us posted, you know, the whole WA zero thing as we deal with, you know, security is being top of mind and everything else. And from our DevOps, uh, audience, this is something that's important. And the fact that you guys are making this available for them to kind of build in, which as you said, developers aren't security professionals.

They don't want to be, but they want to build secure applications. Correct. Exactly.

Yeah, happy to come back. Um, as often as we have these updates, we'll have meaningful updates, especially with auth four gen, ai, and other capabilities. So I'm more than happy to come back and yeah, I'm gonna hold you to that, man.

I love it all. Thanks Lan. All right.

Pleasure to meet Vin. Pleasure to meet you. Vin Roji, president, customer Identity Cloud, ter, you're our tech strong.

We're gonna take a break. We'll be back in a minute with some more tech drunk tv. Thanks.