Hi, everybody. Welcome to Okta's third quarter of fiscal year 2023 earnings webcast. I'm Dave Gennarelli, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations at Okta. With me in today's meeting, we have Todd McKinnon, our Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder, and Brett Tighe, Chief Financial Officer. Today's meeting will include forward-looking statements pursuant to the Safe Harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including but not limited to, statements regarding our financial outlook and market positioning. Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties that may cause our actual results, performance, or achievements to be materially different from those expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements represent our management's beliefs and assumptions only as of the date made.
Information on factors that could affect the company's financial results is included in our filings with the SEC from time to time, including the section titled Risk Factors in our previously filed Form 10-Q. In addition, during today's meeting, we will discuss non-GAAP financial measures. These non-GAAP financial measures are in addition to and not a substitute for or superior to measures of financial performance prepared in accordance with GAAP. A reconciliation between GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures and a discussion of the limitations of using non-GAAP measures versus their closest GAAP equivalents is available in our earnings release. You can also find detailed information on our supplemental financial materials, which include trended financial statements and key metrics posted on our investor relations website.
In today's meeting, we will quote a number of numerical growth changes as we discuss our financial performance, and unless otherwise noted, each such reference represents a year-over-year comparison. Now I'd like to turn the meeting over to Todd McKinnon. Todd?
Thanks, Dave. Thank you everyone for joining us this afternoon. We're pleased with our Q3 results, but before reviewing them, I thought I'd provide an update on some of the progress with respect to the execution challenges we faced this year. Our confidence in our ability to further advance our leadership position in a very large market opportunity has not wavered. In fact, with all the great new products and functionality we announced at Oktane22 earlier this month, we are more optimistic about our long-term prospects than ever. The action plan we initiated to stem attrition has delivered meaningful improvement over the last quarter, and while we're making progress with the execution challenges we outlined, we recognize that it will take several quarters to regain top-line momentum in the business. Adding to the challenge is a global macro environment that we anticipate becoming worse before it improves.
Brett will talk more specifically about what we're seeing in our business in terms of the macro environment and the more cautious approach we're taking to our business outlook. We view these issues as short-term in nature. We continue to focus on the long term while making the necessary adjustments to the business in the near term, including our commitment to meaningfully higher profitability and cash flow. One constant is that identity will remain a critically important element to organizations. At Oktane22 earlier this month, we officially unveiled our simplified two-cloud approach to the market, the Workforce Identity Cloud and the Customer Identity Cloud. Two clouds, one Okta. This alignment has alleviated prior confusion in the field and sets us up to build on these two powerful pillars. More importantly, this strategy has been enthusiastically received by our go-to-market team, customers, and partners.
A great proof point is the upward trend line of the number of sales reps that have closed Customer Identity Cloud deals over the past three quarters. The feedback that I personally received in my conversations with dozens of partners and customers at Oktane was overwhelmingly positive. We firmly believe that it will only get better with time. Identity matters to every part of an organization, which is why it's such a strategic decision. CIOs care about high-performing IT, CMOs care about conversion and customer acquisition, CTOs care about innovation, CFOs care about costs and efficiency, and CEOs and their boards care about all of these things. Identity can help address all of these. Having one account exec to speak to all these decision-makers will help drive a more cohesive identity strategy across the entire organization.
Turning to our Q3 results, we added 650 new customers in the quarter, bringing our total customer base to over 17,000, representing growth of 22%. We continue to see growth with large customers for both Workforce and Customer Identity, we are proud to work with some of the most important brands in the world, such as S&P Global, McKesson, and Zoom. In Q3, we added 215 customers with $100,000-plus ACV. Our total base of $100,000-plus ACV customers now stands at over 3,700 and grew 32%. Here are just a few notable examples of customer wins in Q3, which come from a wide range of industries. KeyBank, a Fortune 500 financial services company, was a significant Okta Workforce new business win.
They sought a cloud-based identity solution to help modernize their legacy systems, eliminate redundancies across tool sets, and support their cloud-first initiatives. Okta's Workforce Identity Cloud will provide a unified identity system while also enhancing security through adaptive multi-factor authentication for KeyBank's 25,000 globally distributed employees. A Fortune 100 global entertainment conglomerate was a big upsell this quarter. As a result of many acquisitions, the company has disparate identity providers that resulted in its employees having multiple different logins to access corporate apps, resulting in friction, unpleasant user experiences, and slowed business outcomes. Having leveraged Okta Workforce for several business units, this customer is now deploying Okta Workforce Identity Cloud to cover its more than 200,000 employees.
Today, they are one of our largest customers. We believe there is significantly more opportunity to unlock as we partner with them going forward. We also closed our biggest Customer Identity Cloud deal ever with a multinational technology company. This company began using Okta back in 2019 to better connect with its business partners. The company sought to consolidate onto a single identity provider while accelerating revenue, moving to the cloud, and enhancing its security posture. The Okta Customer Identity Cloud will help increase security and harden authentication for this customer amid increased security concerns while maintaining the ease of their end-user experience. We also had another strong quarter with our public sector vertical. Year to date, our business with PubSec organizations has increased over 65%, with great wins across both Workforce Identity Cloud and Customer Identity Cloud.
A great workforce upsell in Q3 was with a huge federal agency that will cover tens of thousands of their employees. The agency is modernizing its legacy on-prem identity technology. We see significantly more opportunity to expand our relationship with this agency and the even larger agency that it rolls up to. We also continue to have success with state and local agencies as they replace legacy identity solutions for both their employees and their citizens. In Q3 alone, cities like Birmingham, Charlotte, and Tampa all turned to Okta. We got to meet with some of these customers just a couple of weeks ago at Oktane in San Francisco. This was our 10th Oktane, and we had nearly 10,000 registrants for the in-person and online event, a sold-out partner pavilion, and 9 million views of the live opening keynote stream.
During the event, we announced numerous new products, features, and functionality that we believe will elevate Okta's market leadership position. In our strategy to build the primary cloud for identity, we now cover the most use cases of any company and help solve the most challenging identity issues that are being driven by the increasing deployment of cloud technology, the adoption of Zero Trust security, and digital transformation projects. As Okta invests in both of our clouds and develops purpose-built functionality for app building, IT, and security teams, we're also investing in connecting our clouds. This interoperability and connection has the ability to create greater value for customers in flexibility and security, and it can also become the catalyst for rapid innovation that drives business outcomes. The foundation of this interoperability is the Okta Identity Platform, where shared platform services and the Okta Integration Network reside.
As the Okta Identity Platform evolves, additional services will be available for customers, emphasizing capabilities that unlock even more use cases. Core to Okta's success is our independence and neutrality. The Okta Integration Network is the foundational technology that supports customer choice. It was innovative when we launched it 13 years ago, and it still offers the broadest selection and deepest integrations available. The success we're having with customers around the world is directly related to the Okta Integration Network. Monolithic platforms try to imitate the Okta Integration Network, but they can never replicate it. In fact, we're now taking the power of the Okta Integration Network to the next level with the power of our two clouds. By having both clouds together, we further enable this open ecosystem of choice.
Workforce customers get the functionality they are craving, like seamless Zero Trust security, continuous authentication, and fine-grained authorization , all working out of the box. For the SaaS builders, they know what enterprise readiness looks like because we define it in the Customer Identity Cloud and can plug into the Workforce customers around the world. All of this pushes the identity industry forward, resulting in more standardization that benefits everyone. Finally, I want to thank Susan St. Ledger for her dedication to Okta the past two years. We wish her well in her retirement at the end of this fiscal year. We're initiating a search, if a successor isn't in place at that time, I will step in to lead the go-to-market organization in the interim. Susan will stay on as an advisor to provide for a successful transition.
We're looking forward to bringing on the next leader who will help Okta further penetrate the massive market opportunity. To wrap things up, we're pleased with our Q3 financial results. We've made some early progress to improve our execution challenges. We recognize we still have a lot more work to do to regain our business momentum. I want to thank the entire Okta team for their tireless work. I also want to thank everyone who came out to support us at Oktane22. Here's Brett to walk you through more of the Q3 financial details and our outlook for meaningfully increased profitability in Q4 and next year.
Thanks, Todd. Thank you everyone for joining us today. I'll start with some commentary on the macro environment and then get into our third quarter results, followed by our outlook. With regards to the macro environment, while we didn't experience a meaningful change in sales cycles, we are seeing signs that the environment has further weakened since we spoke last quarter. For example, in Q3, new pipeline is more weighted towards upsells, and we're experiencing some softening demand in the SMB market in North America. Turning to our Q3 results, total revenue growth for the third quarter was 37%, driven by a 38% increase in subscription revenue. Subscription revenue represented 97% of our total revenue. International revenue grew 39% and represents 22% of our total revenue. We experienced minor FX headwinds, which are incorporated into our reported numbers.
RPO, or backlog, grew 21% to $2.85 billion. Impacting total RPO growth is the general shortening of term lengths of recently signed contracts and an increase in public sector contracts, which generally have a one-year term length. Our average term length is just over two and a half years. Current RPO, which represents subscription revenue we expect to recognize over the next 12 months, grew 34% to $1.58 billion. We view Current RPO as the better metric to assess our quarterly performance relative to calculated billings, which, as we've noted, can be noisy due to fluctuations in invoice timing and contract duration. Calculated billings and current calculated billings grew 37%. Turning to retention. Our dollar-based net retention rate for the trailing 12-month period remained strong at 122%.
This was driven by the strong upsell motion we are seeing with our existing customers as they expand on both products and users. As always, the net retention rate may fluctuate from quarter to quarter as the mix of new business renewals and upsells fluctuates. Consistent with prior quarters, gross retention rates remained very healthy in the mid- 90% range, despite experiencing some sequential weakness in the SMB market. Before turning to expense items and profitability, I'll point out that I will be discussing non-GAAP results going forward. Looking at operating expenses. Total operating expenses for the quarter were lower than expected and allowed us to return to non-GAAP profitability with slightly positive operating income. The better-than-expected profitability is primarily due to the combination of revenue overperformance and better than expected outcomes from spend efficiency measures of the past four quarters. Moving to cash flow.
Free cash flow was $6 million. We ended the third quarter with a strong balance sheet anchored by nearly $2.5 billion in cash equivalents, and short-term investments. Overall, we're pleased with our Q3 results. Now, let's turn to our business outlook for Q4 and FY 2024. This outlook incorporates the execution challenges we experienced this year, which resulted in lower than expected capacity build as we moved through the year. We're also taking a more cautious stance on the macro environment, which we believe will get worse before getting better. We expect to continue to benefit from the spend reduction measures we started implementing in Q3, including significantly reducing our hiring plans, rationalizing our facilities footprint, and applying greater overall financial discipline. The reductions will help us further improve our operating margins and profitability in Q4 and beyond.
For the fourth quarter of FY 2023, we expect total revenue of $488 million-$490 million , representing growth of 27%-28%. Current RPO of $1.63 billion- $1.64 billion, representing growth of 21%. non-GAAP operating income of $15 million- $17 million, and non-GAAP diluted net income per share of $0.09- $0.10, assuming diluted weighted average shares outstanding of approximately 175 million. For FY 2023, we are raising our revenue outlook by approximately $18 million at the high end. We now expect revenue of $1.836 billion- $1.838 billion, representing growth of 41%. We are raising our profitability outlook by approximately $66 million at the high end.
We now expect non-GAAP operating loss of $41 million-$39 million, and non-GAAP net loss per share of $0.27-$0.26, assuming weighted average shares outstanding of approximately 158 million. Lastly, I want to provide a few comments to help with modeling Okta. We're providing a non-GAAP fully diluted share count for Q4 because we expect to flip to positive non-GAAP net income for the quarter. We will continue to provide a basic share count for FY 2023 because of the net loss position for the full year. We expect Q4 to be our seasonally strongest quarter for free cash flow, and expect free cash flow margin to be in the low double digits. We also expect free cash flow margin for FY 2023 to be in the low single digits.
We are increasing our calculated billings outlook for FY 2023 by approximately $25 million to $2.065 billion-$2.075 billion, representing growth of 28%-29% when viewed on a like-for-like basis , or 20%-21% on an as reported basis. As we've noted throughout this year, this will be the final time we provide a billings outlook. While we are in the early phases of financial planning, we would also like to provide a preliminary view of FY 2024. With our continued focus on expense control, we are focused on achieving non-GAAP profitability for FY 2024 and an operating margin in the low single digits.
We're also targeting a meaningful increase to free cash flow and free cash flow margin over FY 2023. We'll provide more specific cash flow comments on our Q4 call. From a revenue perspective, we are factoring in the execution challenges we faced this year, the go-to-market leadership transition, and the growing uncertainties of the macroeconomic environment. We estimate total revenue to be in the range of $2.13 billion-$2.145 billion, or growth of 16%-17%. While we had initially planned on providing an update on our long-term targets, we believe it's prudent to wait and revisit this once we have increased visibility and confidence in the macro environment, new global field operations leadership in place, and have made more progress on the integration.
To wrap things up, we're confident we have the right action plan in place to build on our progress and expand on our market leadership position. I'll turn it back to Dave for Q&A. Dave?
Thanks, Brett. In the interest of time, please limit yourself to one question so that we can get to everyone. You're welcome to queue back up with additional questions afterward. With that, we'll take the first question from Matthew Hedberg at RBC. Matt?
Hey. Thanks a lot, guys. Congrats on the bounce back quarter here. Maybe Brett, for you, on the revenue guide, thank you for that preliminary look. I think that's super helpful. Can you provide maybe some of the underlying inputs in that? You know, how you're thinking about like customer adds, NRR, anything to kind of give us a little better sense of sort of, you know, how you came up with that. I think it was 16%-17% growth.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, first and-
Hey, Matt, I know you asked Brett, but let me jump in real quick and then turn it over to Brett, if that's okay.
I think that first of all, we are very, very bullish and excited on the long-term opportunity. Identity is critical for so many things, whether it's companies transitioning to the cloud, adopting technology, or building customer-facing initiatives, or enhancing their security posture. When we talk about the business outlook for the fourth quarter or next year, there are some headwinds, and we can talk about how we've come to this outlook. The long-term opportunity is super bullish, and we're really excited about the opportunity in front of us.
Yeah, I can take it from there. Thanks, Todd. You know, I think before I talk about FY 2024, it's kind of all wrapped together with how we talked about things last quarter, right. If you think about last quarter, there are a few things that we talked about. There was some challenges in terms of the integration challenges we talked about, specifically around Customer Identity. Second one being around attrition. The third one, which was a distant third, was from a macro perspective, right. Let's flash forward to today, 90 days later. How have those things progressed? Because that's influencing us how we're thinking about the macro or the overall guidance for next year.
If you think about the attrition, you heard about it earlier in the call, significant improvement, but it's one quarter. We're not getting overly excited, we're remaining cautiously optimistic. You know, we're not gonna say, "Hey, one quarter's a trend." We gotta see a longer trend. We're gonna see that over time and make sure that continues to improve. The second was around the integration, the Customer Identity Cloud. You heard earlier today there's some progress there, early progress. Larger number of sales reps in field being involved with customer identity deals. Once again, one-quarter trend. We're pleased with where we are. It's once again, cautiously optimistic. The third one we talked about last time was around the macro.
Last time we talked about it, like I just said, it wasn't very apparent to us, right? It was small. Well, you could start to see signs of it. This quarter has gotten significantly, it's worsened since then. We're thinking it's gonna get worse from here. You think about the fourth factor we're thinking about from this guidance perspective, that fourth factor being the transition in go-to-market leadership. When you add all that all up today, you get to that 16%-17% revenue growth. Really thinking about it, you know, you gotta remember, you know, we're pretty early right now. You know, we're still going through our financial planning process. We'll finalize those numbers over the next couple months, we're being prudent in the approach from a top-line perspective.
One thing I wanna be very clear about is the first time we've ever given you this is around margin expectations at this point of the year for the following fiscal year. Typically, we just give you a revenue kind of first look, right? Now we're talking about also pairing that with margin. If you look at what I just what I just talked about in terms of, you know, non-GAAP profitability, low positive single digits, that'll be a significant improvement over FY 2023. You can even see in FY 2023 the improvement we've had as growth has moderated.
If you look at our initial guide on non-GAAP operating profit for the full fiscal year 2023, and you look at where it is today, it's over a $140 million improvement just in a span of a few quarters. We're expecting to really improve margin, really focus on profitable growth in the years to come. Also free cash flow margin obviously improving meaningfully, and we'll give you some more information on that when we talk at the Q4 earnings process.
Thanks a lot, guys. Super helpful.
All right, let's go to Gray Powell at BTIG.
Okay, great. Thanks for, thanks for taking the question. I just wanted to follow up on Matt's question and just drill into the revenue guidance more. I mean, I guess I, you know, just 16%-17% growth seems really conservative. I definitely appreciate there's a lot of uncertainty out there and that you guys are giving us visibility pretty a lot earlier than most companies will. I mean, can maybe just talk more about how de-risked you think that number is? Within the context of that guidance, how should we think about growth between Workforce and Customer Identity? Thanks.
Hey, Gray. I think this is a good time to be very cautious, in my opinion, and you heard Brett's comments about the conservatism and the pragmatic approach we've taken to the forward outlook. There's something else that he didn't mention directly, which I think is important, which is, like every other company in the world, we are looking at our investments, and particularly the investments around growth, and really stack ranking them and saying, "What are the most likely to have high ROI, and what should we double down on that we think is gonna be the most productive?" Some of the things that maybe in years past we would have embarked upon that may, the likelihood of a high ROI isn't as high, we're not gonna do those things.
You're also seeing a focusing and a prioritizing of the initiatives of the company, and that means on the margins, less investment and also less opportunity for growth.
Got it. Okay, thank you very much.
Yeah, and about Customer Identity and Workforce Identity, I know, I remember that was part of your question too. When we think about macro and we think about the situation worsening and our outlook of it getting worse before it gets better, it's pretty balanced across both of those business lines, both Customer and Workforce, in terms of the impact. We did see more impact in the SMB segment across both of those business lines, and there's kind of puts and takes we're seeing across both in terms of we've seen cases where the economic environment is leading to people really scrutinizing budgets and not moving forward with projects. We've also seen cases where companies really wanna consolidate and invest more aggressively because of the, you know, more focus on expense control and consolidating on one vendor.
It's a little bit hard. It's definitely not specific to any particular one of our products. It's a little bit hard to predict because we see conservative economic conditions or recessionary conditions helping in some cases and hurting in other cases. It's a little bit hard to predict, which is why we think it's really prudent to be super cautious in the outlook.
Yeah, I would add to that, I think from a macro perspective, like you heard me say, a couple minutes ago, I would probably be less focused on Customer Identity versus Workforce Identity. It would probably be more along the lines of which segments they're in, right? We saw that softening of demand kind of in the small and medium-sized businesses in North America.
On the flip side, you saw some really large customer wins in the quarter, actually a fair amount of them. You saw the greater than 100,000 number grow at a very healthy clip. It's kind of a tale of two worlds right now in terms of segments. That's probably where we're seeing the biggest differentiation rather than by product.
All right. That's really helpful color. Congrats on the improved execution this quarter. Thanks.
Thank you.
All right. Next, let's go to Jonathan Ho at William Blair.
Hey there. Sorry about that. Can you give me a second? Can you maybe give us a little bit more color, as you start to think about this progress that you've made on the go-to-market and sales realignment improvements, you know, maybe what were you most proud of in terms of accomplishments? Maybe what is still a work in progress when it comes to that go-to-market side?
I think the most impactful has been clarity of the message. At Oktane, we really started the process of clarifying the message, as you know, a few months ago, four or five months ago now. we really had a opportunity to show it off at Oktane, and the clear message of, this is Workforce Identity, this is Customer Identity, they're two clouds that are each best in class, and they're better together, that resonated really well, not only with the field organization, but also with customers and partners. Everyone gets it. They understand the strategy. They understand that we are already the, by far, the leading independent and neutral identity platform. This sets us up to really cement that lead and extend that lead over the long term. It translated into...
It's not just the impression from a conference, it translated into the really quantifiable metrics, like the number of sales reps that have actually done a Customer Identity Cloud deal is increasing the last three quarters sequentially, which is a really good sign. The lower attrition rate is a good sign. I think that's the most impactful change. The thing that, you know, when we talk about our outlook and being cautious, the big thing there, Jonathan, is that the more time in seat a go-to-market person has, the more familiar they are with the products, the more they understand the customer's problems and the value props. Time and different at bats in this process builds strength and capability. I think what to improve is just give the great folks in go-to-market more time and more at bats.
They're amazing. It's an amazing team that now that we've given them this clarified positioning, something that was really, I think, we put them in a tough spot before. We've clarified the positioning. Now they're gonna get the at bats and build the muscle and be, you know, amazingly productive in the future.
Thank you.
Great. Let's go to Hamza Fodderwala at Morgan Stanley.
Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my question. Way to throw the kitchen sink on the guide. I wanted to talk a little bit about the profitability. You're gonna be growing high teens next year. It sounds like there's still some capacity build that needs to take place because of the attrition this year, and there's probably gonna be a little bit of a drag on sales growth productivity. I'm just curious if you could put a finer point on how you're driving that incremental leverage in FY 2024.
Actually, I would say the capacity build is not the area I would focus on, Hamza. I would say it's more about the productivity. It's exactly what Todd was just talking about. Getting those reps even more tenured and getting more productivity out of them, right? Because we, as you know, Hamza, you've been following us long enough to know that a year. A rep that's been here for three years is far more productive than one that's been here for nine months, right? Both aren't ramping anymore in our technical terms, but you're getting a much more productive rep at that point. You know, that's one side, just from your pure sales and marketing perspective.
I think other areas that we're focusing, obviously, you know, the classic focus on productivity across the rest of the organization. One of the key things, you know, we're still, like I said, we're still early in our planning process, but one of the key goals we're talking about next year is around automation, around improving the productivity of not just the field, but, like, my team, you know, the R&D team. How do we make everyone a little bit more productive? That's one of the ways we see the margins improving over time.
Helpful. Thank you.
Let's go to Rob Owens at Piper.
Thanks, Dave, and thanks for taking my question. Todd, obviously a lot of management turnover, over the last six months. At a high level, just address, you know, what's transpired, what's first in terms of your agenda, as you rebuild this team?
I think the team. Speaking broadly, the team is incredibly strong, and I'm very happy with the team. Specifically about Susan, I think the world of Susan, and I wanna just thank her for her contribution. She's an amazing person and an amazing executive, and after 30 years in operating roles, she's gonna retire now and spend time on boards. By the way, she's gonna, she's already on a board, and she's gonna be on many more. I think she's gonna be an amazing board member. I think the world of her. Also, one of the reasons is the team she's built.
It's an amazing team that's gonna carry on with a deep bench of talent, and they're gonna take this strategy and this vision that we're executing on, and that team and the entire team is gonna do a great job at it. It's always hard to see people retire, especially someone of Susan's ability, but, you know, the show must go on, and we're gonna do a search for her backfill. We're gonna look at internal candidates and external candidates. Although it's gonna be hard to find someone as good as her, we're gonna do a thorough search, and I have no doubt that we will.
Thanks for the color.
Let's go to Joseph Gallo at Jefferies.
Hey, guys. Thanks for the question. Appreciate the comments on macro and prudence in baking in a worsening environment before it gets better. Maybe based on your conversations with customers, what is their viewpoint on cyber budgets in 2023 and when it can get better? Or is this malaise more of a long-term new normal? Thanks.
It's... We see the, like I mentioned earlier, just kind of repeating myself here, that it's, the conversations are a little bit, there's like a different story for every customer in terms of some customers, particularly in the SMB segment, are delaying purchases or reevaluating things. This quarter, the past quarter, Q3, was one of our best quarters ever for large deals. Deals that were in process mostly on the upsell side, they, you know, the big entertainment conglomerate I talked about in the prepared remarks, this company has bought several companies over the last few years that were Okta customers, and when that happens, at some point the success is overwhelming.
They know that to move their whole global organization forward, it needs to standardize, and this process happens over multiple years from the acquisitions to the success to the consensus building inside the company. When it happens, it happens regardless of the macro environment that's hitting this company as hard as it's hitting other companies. Another example is the story of KeyBank, which is this is a consolidation play. They had several legacy vendors and disparate identity tools, so they look at the economy and say, "We need to consolidate onto one identity platform," and it helps there.
There's other customers that are saying, "Hey, we're gonna maybe stick with what we have a little longer." It's, it all adds up to validating the long-term trends we know that have been powering our success for a long time and will continue over the long term as well, but there's just a lot of uncertainty in terms of how it plays out in the details and the timing of the progress over the next several quarters.
Makes sense. Thank you.
Next up, John DiFucci at Guggenheim.
Thanks. Todd, our field work, we're hearing that customers really wanna buy IGA from Okta too, but they really wanna buy the whole suite, and so they're waiting until PAM is ready. I guess, first of all, do you agree with that? Secondly, can you give us any update on the PAM product release?
I think it's good to hear that because it plays right into our strategy, which is we wanna have the best identity product in many categories and establish this wall-to-wall identity platform. We already are the largest independent neutral platform, and we have a chance to even extend that lead and build one of the most important companies ever around identity. Something, by the way, that's never been done before. We're really excited about that long-term vision. Specifically about the products, we've talked a lot about Customer Identity Cloud and Workforce Identity Cloud. Specifically in Workforce, the access management products, single sign-on, advanced multi-factor authentication, clearly the leader there. Identity Governance, a newer product for us. It's only been available in North America for a quarter or two quarters coming up on, and it's generally available by the end of this year.
This product is off to a very, very fast start. It's exceeding all of our expectations, and it's going, in terms of the reasons why it's successful, it's exactly what we thought. It's much better to be sold and deployed next to the leading access management product. There's a natural synergy in terms of technical integrations there, and also buyer integrations. The person that buys access management often is the person or the group or the very close to the group that buys governance, and that's very powerful there. We're also very excited about the progress of our PAM product. We announced at Oktane that that's going to be in early access just in a couple quarters, so in Q2 of 2024, which is you know, six months from now or so.
Then generally available by the end of next year. This product really is like the topping on the sundae in terms of this last piece of covering a few more resource types, vaulting credentials, being tightly integrated with the reporting capabilities of access management and IGA with the resource coverage, so not just applications, but also servers and root accounts on servers and Kubernetes clusters, and rounding out that whole. I can't believe I just made the analogy that my product is like a sundae, but that's the analogy. It's, you know, we're really excited about the progress. We have to, you know, PAM is on track.
It's been taking longer than we thought, as we've talked about, but we're very confident in the dates we've delivered and real, also confident, really optimistic about the early feedback we've had from the customers we have spoken with about it.
Is there any?
Yeah.
I'm sorry. Is there any way to speed that up?
No, it's okay. Go ahead, John.
I'm, I just. Any way to speed that up instead of the end of next year? It just seems like a long time. Sorry, Dave. I won't do that again.
No, it's all right. We appreciate the feedback. It's got a big focus, and I think that like a lot of the forward-looking dates and estimates and modeling we're doing, I think that's a very, prudent and achievable date.
Thank you.
I think I was just gonna add to what Todd said, John, around IGA. If you remember, Workflows is one of the components of IGA, right? We've had that around for a long time. It's been one of our most successful products. When we look at the stickiness, the win rates, all that sort of stuff alongside in, or in Workflows, which is obviously a component of IGA, there's a lot of success there. We're, like Todd said, we're off to a really fast start. We're excited where we're headed.
Thanks, guys.
All right. Let's go over to our new customer, Eric Heath at KeyBanc Capital Markets.
Appreciate that. Thanks, Dave. Todd, I mean, you previously talked about kind of expanding the set of channel partners you work with to more of the, call it the new school channel partners, so GSIs and cloud marketplaces. Just curious if you can give us an update on how that avenue performed, that indirect sales motion performed in the quarter. Maybe if you can just kind of give us a, an update on how much of that business today is kind of coming from these newer channel partners versus maybe the traditional channel partners.
I think the trends that in the quarter were consistent with what we've seen. The Amazon Marketplace continues to do very well. I think that's a good model for how customers wanna buy in general, looking to marketplaces from big cloud platforms and procuring solutions through there. That's a trend we're investing into. We're also working really hard. The customer identity business, the Customer Identity Cloud, has a very interesting, big, long-term opportunity for partners, which is, as we've talked about over and over, and you all understand, that these applications and these sites are built. So this is a huge opportunity for large SIs, and frankly, an area where with the workforce business, if you talk to a big global SI, the cloud modern workforce identity business, a lot of times is it's kinda too easy.
They'd rather spend their time with a legacy stack where they have a lot of services dollars to wrap around that. You know, getting the big SIs interested at times has been challenging for Okta. Compared to the business' opportunity for helping people deploy workforce technology, it's relatively small. The customer identity side is a huge opportunity with people wanting to build solutions and companies needing help building transformative customer-facing projects, and getting that motion started is really important on the partner side of the Customer Identity Cloud business.
Yeah, I might just add to that in the sense that you know, on the indirect side, we do continue to see more and more of the business be part of the indirect channel. Also, like just Todd said, the marketplaces are growing quite rapidly. It's a very interesting way for people to buy from us.
Thank you. Okay. Next up, Peter Weed at Bernstein.
Thank you, and congratulations on the continued progress that you're making. You know, one of the things that I was really impressed with is the continued leverage that you're getting in OpEx. I completely understand the sales and marketing side, but, you know, I think we saw it continue to strongly come through in R&D and G&A. I wanted to kinda hear how you're thinking about that, particularly on the R&D side. You know, was that coming from, you know, freezing of hiring? Was that, you know, kind of an increase in churn of people in R&D?
kind of on the right level going forward, you know, I think, my quick penciling out is, you know, you're in the high teens % of subscription revenue on the non-GAAP basis right now. Is that kind of the level that you wanna keep it at? Is that too lean and you're thinking about, you know, bringing in a bit more next year? Is there something you're trying to get even more? Like, how are you thinking about that on the R&D side, given, you know, the criticality of these people kind of to the future platform?
Yeah. I'll let Todd talk about maybe the second part of that question, but I can answer more of the financial side of it, which is, when we talked to you last, we talked about some cost efficiency measures that we implemented. Those cost efficiency measures, you'll see them coming through, not only in Q3 in the results, but also our guidance for Q4 and FY 2024, which is, you know, we slowed down hiring. I mean, you can look at the quarter-over-quarter increase. It was about half of what it's been the last four quarters, that was us slowing down everything as growth moderated, right? This concept of balancing growth and margin over the years is something we've applied in the past. You can see it happening even in FY 2023 and into FY 2024.
That just didn't affect R&D. It affected, you know, some other areas across the P&L. We also rationalized real estate footprint, which although it's not, you know, gets allocated across the P&L, so you see an effect there. You're seeing it across the board of these cost-saving initiatives for us to kind of drive the profitability up, you know, so much so that we're slightly positive this quarter and guiding positive in Q4. I'll let Todd answer the second part of the question around what's the right level.
One thing that is, I think when you look at the income statement and expenses on R&D, one part of our strategy is really critical is that Workforce Identity, Workforce Identity Cloud, Customer Identity Cloud, we strongly believe that these are both important markets that to own the, and provide value across an entire identity platform, we have to be the leader in both. We're investing in terms of R&D commensurately. We think that we could take the two R&D teams and try to get more efficient and try to combine them all. We don't think that's the right approach. We think the right approach is build the best-in-class clouds for both of these use cases. Over time, with our Okta Identity Platform, bring together things that are common. We've talked about common platform services that can get shared value across both.
It's a long way of saying we think it's worth the increased R&D investment now to lead this market, and over time you are gonna see more shared services and more R&D efficiency over the next several years.
I think what I'm hearing you say though is that, while you've gotten more leverage out of R&D, that is, it feels appropriate to you, that level, and you're thinking about kind of holding it there. It's not something where you might increase spend, going into next year as you get, say, more efficiency out of sales and marketing and rotate some of that cost savings into kind of increased R&D spend as a percentage of revenue.
That's accurate. Yeah. It feels right to us at this level.
Thank you.
You're welcome.
Next we'll go to Alex Henderso n at Needham.
Great. Thanks. Can you hear me?
Hey, Alex. Nice to see you.
I wanted to dig into the exact subject we were just talking about. Your headcount was up 32% year-over-year, but only 4.5% quarter-to-quarter. If you're going to get leverage next year, that would require the headcount growth rate quarter-to-quarter to actually flat now considerably from here. When we think about that, you know, 16%, 17%, 18% type top- line growth rate, are we now talking about headcount growth in, you know, 5%-10% range? If that's the case, how do you allocate that headcount additions? Underneath the surface of that, can you give us a little bit more granularity on the, the degree of attrition and the, the wage rates?
Yeah. I mean, when we look at the cost structure, Alex, I mean, it's really majority is head count, right? I mean, we're a typical software company. You guys probably know the standard ratios, right, of how much that is head count. Yeah, obviously when we look into next year, we're evaluating what the right thing to do is from a head count growth perspective. We're still early in the planning process. You know, we still have a few months to go on that, ultimately, yeah, we're evaluating the cost structure, and we'll let you guys know more in next year, when we get into, you know, obviously the Q4 earnings.
Ultimately, yeah, we're not just evaluating head count, we're evaluating all the other spend as well to be able to make sure that we can grow these margins in the right direction.
If we're not gonna go that direction, maybe you could just give us some sense of the differential between domestic and international growth, which is kind of hard to evaluate over the last couple of quarters because of the M&A. I'm curious if we can get there.
You're talking about the difference of the change in U.S. versus international, the revenue?
Right.
Yeah. I mean, look, we had actually a strong quarter in EMEA. I was actually thankful to once again. This is when you think about the macro, this plays, ties into what we've been talking about, is there's actually a fair amount of large deals in EMEA. That helped us grow in the quarter, and that's where you see, you know, international revenue being 22% of total, right? There was an FX headwind that hit there. It wasn't hugely material, but it is starting to hit us a little bit on the revenue side. Really, EMEA had a good quarter. Ultimately when we're looking ahead, international continues to be a focus of ours, right?
If you think about the three things that we talked about as our main goals this year, one was customer identity, second was federal, the third one was global acceleration, right?
Mm.
You know, those things are still in play. We're still actively working that. You heard in Todd's script around federal growing, you know, 65% year to date. Then global acceleration, you can see it in the international numbers. Yeah, I just told you, like I said, EMEA had a very good quarter, and we had some very large deals there, which we're really pleased with. We're just at the tip of the iceberg with the international side of the house. There's so much opportunity out there. We need to focus and continue to make inroads there, because, you know, identity is not a U.S. problem, right? It's a worldwide problem. We gotta be able to continue to focus there.
Great. Thank you so much.
No problem.
All right. We still have a long queue here. I gotta ask again to keep it to one question. Josh, over to you at Wolfe.
Hey, guys. Thanks for, thanks for squeezing me in here. I really appreciate the de-risk numbers for next year, so thanks for that. Just a simple one from me. When we look at this new guidance, how should we think about your ability to outperform these numbers as we head into next year?
Yeah, I mean, when we're thinking about the guidance, obviously you heard me talk about being cautiously optimistic, right? I'm being prudent in the guidance that we're giving you today, both on the revenue and the margin side, right? We're still doing our planning process. We're doing the same play we've done for you guys for years. you know, we still got a big quarter ahead of us, right? Q4, biggest quarter of the year, we are being prudent with everything that's going on, whether it be the macro, whether it be some of the integration challenges that we've had. We see early signs of success, we're not gonna bank on them right now. We're gonna be prudent and cautious, like you've heard us talk about throughout this call.
Okay. Next up, we'll go to Adam Tindle at Raymond James. Oh, we can't hear you, Adam. Adam, you're on mute.
There we go. Double mute. I'll try to be quick here. Key one for Todd. You know, the key point to generating leverage here that you're talking about, or one of the key points is rep tenure, and attrition did improve during Q3. Susan talked about that at Oktane, and she mentioned adding more commission dollars in the pool as one of the factors that helped to improve attrition. The message today that we're hearing is understandably a focus on profitability. You've got this attractive profitability swing in fiscal 2024. I'm just wondering how do you achieve that profitability swing while avoiding another attrition surprise that would derail that operating leverage story, especially with the end of the fiscal year coming up. Are there other options beyond the commission pool that would help with that? Thank you.
It's a really astute question, and the way I think about it is there's a lot of different levers to make the whole team successful. We've talked a lot about last call and this call about sales attrition. Sales is like the tip of the spear. A lot has to go well to support them to make them successful. The problem is not sales. The problem is clarity of the message. We've, you know, we've done much better at that. Clear, compelling positioning, enablement. These are all the things that we're getting better at.
I think holistically, when you think about next year, it's how much do we invest, where do we invest in terms of people, coverage, and how do we get the balance between prudent financial management on how much resources we deploy into the field versus the expected return and the expected productivity and balancing that. Yeah, commission is one important variable, but it's relatively small in terms of the overall investment in go-to-market capacity as it leads to productivity and leverage in the model there.
Yeah, I would just add that, I mean, that's one of those things you've heard me talk about, Adam, when we're talking about the guidance.
You know, hey, one quarter we've really improved on a variety of things, but we're being cautious about the future because one quarter doesn't make a trend. I wish it did. Make our life a lot easier.
Okay, let's go over to Shrenik Kothari at Baird.
Hey. Yeah. Thanks, thanks for taking my question. You guys mentioned the 100,000+ customers grew nicely 32%. The net new customer adds back out. There was also sequentially better quarter-on-quarter, I think overall 22% year-on-year. Yeah, I mean, kind of adds up with the number of sales reps that you said are closing the Customer Identity deals sequentially getting better over three quarters. One comment you made was the pipeline is more weighted towards upsells and, I mean, of course you're seeing some softening in the SMB market. Are you already starting to see that SMB softening in the customer adds as well on that side of things as well? Yeah.
I think I don't actually know the mix of the degree of softening of upsells versus new business. We just, we know that the SMB segment of our business was less than we would've liked this past quarter. Balanced with a lot of other things, you know, the whole, the overall mix of the entire book of business being more upsell focused than usual lead us to strongly believe that that's macro-related, both just anecdotally in the conversations, but plus when we look at it quantitatively in the statistics across the whole business.
Got it. Got it. Thanks a lot. Appreciate it.
Okay, next we'll go to Fatima Boolani at Citi.
Hey. Good evening, everyone. Thanks for taking my questions. Brett, you know, between you and Todd, you sort of talked a lot about the strength in the renewal side of the business and, of course, the performance in the quarter being weighted more towards upsells, you know, presumably coming from the installed base. What I wanted to ask you was just around the conversations with respect to renewals. What we've heard from some of your peers is, you know, there is increasingly an orientation from customers to manage their cash flow, manage their OpEx budget. I think we saw a little bit of this in your backlog and RPO, 'cause you called it out. But I'm curious from an invoicing standpoint, what sort of conversations are you having in your renewal dialogue?
As a related matter, and I think I've asked you this before, you know, we've been seeing, maybe more broad-based sort of employment contraction and layoff activity, and it seems a little bit more concentrated in certain sectors. I'm curious how that's sort of factoring into some of your renewal conversations as well. Thank you.
Yeah, I think there's a couple things, and Todd you can follow up 'cause I think you probably have a thought or two here, which is in terms of renewals, we haven't really seen a material change in renewals. You know, I think the good news is that gross retention rate remains in that, you know, mid-90% range like we've talked about at Investor Day, we talked about it today. I think a quick reminder is, we're fortunate enough to have long contract durations, right? It's a little north of two and a half years. You know, we have the opportunity to deliver value in these contracts. You know, though we don't have to deliver it in the first 30 days, right?
We wake up every morning and say, "How can we deliver value, customer success?" I mean, you heard me at Investor Day talk about loving our customers is the key customer or key Oktane Okta value, and you see that in these retention rates, right? I mean, you need identity. Every modern tech stack needs it, right? So that's why you see the strength in the gross retention. That's why you see the upsells and the net retention number of 122%, right? Because if you don't get the, you know, deliver on the original promise of the original deal, it's hard to get that upsell. And that's why you see these strong numbers on gross and net.
In terms of your question directly around invoicing, we haven't really seen a material change on that either. You know, really things have kind of more or less stayed the same here. You know, I think one of the things we've talked about is upsells continue to be a strength of our business, right? Once we get people in, they get successful, that's why you see these strong retention numbers.
Yeah.
Go ahead, I mean...
on the Workforce business is per named user seat sold in a contract with an average duration of 2.5 years across the whole base. Customer Identity is a monthly active user. One thing I talk to people about, it, when if someone has fewer employees, when that contract comes up for renewal, the per seat is gonna be less. Not the per seat, but the number of seats they buy will be less. That doesn't mean there's. They can still add more products or add more, get more value by buying IGA or by having a new use case around multi-factor authentication or adding customer monthly active users for customers. It's not the Workforce business is to some degree is tied to seat expansion or contraction, but there's many other levers of expansion there as well.
Okay, next we're gonna go to Rudy Kessinger at D.A. Davidson.
Great. Thanks for taking my questions. What % of your sales reps currently are what you would classify as fully productive? I know with the macro, maybe not anybody's really fully productive right now, but what % are fully productive today? Where do you think you can get that within six months?
Yeah. We're, I mean, I don't have the exact figure in front of me, but we are like we talked about last quarter, last quarter was an all-time low in terms of ramped reps as a percentage of the total. Given the attrition numbers we've talked about today, the massive improvement there, you know, we've bounced off the bottom, if you will. We are trending in the right direction, but it's not anywhere near where we want to be, and that's why we continue to talk about being this, you know, cautiously optimistic. You know, we need to get that ramp level as a percentage of total back to more of a historical number, that will take time, right? You heard Todd talk about it. It's not just about the definition of being ramped, right?
We have a definition internally, just like every other company does. It's about getting them to, you know, certain thresholds and productivity, which usually comes with tenure, that is sometimes after that quote unquote "official ramp timeframe" being over with. We need to continue to enable these folks, show them all these opportunities, show them success, and ultimately, that will result in our success because we'll have a more productive field, in the coming quarters and years.
Okay, let's go to Keith Bachman at BMO.
Hi. Thank you. Good evening. Brett, I wanted to. Or, excuse me, Todd, I want to direct this to you if I could. Just a clarification to start with. You indicated that if you didn't find a leader of the go-to-market, you would assume that role. I assume that's just a temporary position. In other words, you would keep searching, 'cause you're being stretched in a lot of different directions. Just wanna clarify that. Then the real question is, in terms of the guide, wanna try to understand the competitive dynamics. What I mean by that is, your CRPO guide for Q4 is 21%, and candidly, you've been beating that a little bit, and yet your rev guide for the out years is below that.
I'm just trying to understand, as the economy weakens here, is the pipeline remaining robust? really are you seeing any changes in the competitive dynamics? I think what the investors have some concern about is, as the macro weakens, perhaps that causes some users to migrate towards Microsoft if the cost is cheaper. just wanted to understand a little bit on that. Many thanks.
Yeah. Specifically on Susan's retirement and timing, the plan is that she is in her job until the end of January.
Okay.
We will be searching for a replacement, considering internal candidates, external candidates, finding the best person in the world. If we don't find anyone by February 1, we'll keep searching, but I'll be the interim until we find someone.
Perfect.
About the competitive environment. The competitive environment, broadly speaking, has been consistent for several years. I talk about this a lot, and for the folks that have been around the story for a long time, the market is kind of decided... The people in the market have decided if they want cloud or they want on-prem. The folks that want on-prem, there's good on-prem solutions like Ping and ForgeRock, and that part of the market is, you know... We think it's smaller right now. We think it's trending down over time as more people want a modern solution. The other big competitive dynamic is, do you wanna get it from a monolithic platform or do you...
that has other apps and services to sell you as well, or do you want an independent and neutral, someone focused on identity? That's been the way it's been for a long time, and our strategy is focused on extending that lead over time. I think. The reality is that in a recessionary environment, what you're saying is likely true. Some people are gonna choose, "Hey, this, the monolithic platform, the Microsoft's." By the way, we assume that every big cloud is gonna have their version of Okta eventually.
Right.
I think it's a very compelling business, obviously, and they're gonna wanna try to provide some of this value, and that's why we think independent neutrality is the best strategic opportunity. Yeah, in a recessionary environment, I'm sure some will choose to go with the monolithic platform. That is kind of like, you know, negative. On the positive side, there are, I gave the example of KeyBank. This past quarter, they're consolidating identity vendors because of the same force, and they're picking the independent neutral leader. That was driving them toward Okta. I think in this whole recessionary environment, I don't expect a competitive environment to... In certain cases, it might shift one way or the other, but in aggregate, I think it's gonna be as consistent as it's been the last four or five years.
All right. Thank you, Todd.
Keith, you just made my entire day by asking the relationship between Current RPO and next year's revenue guide. Thank you.
Well, if I was allowed to ask two questions, I was gonna go on that, but I'll cede the floor. Many thanks.
Yeah. No. I, but I will answer your question. We're just being cautious. That's ultimately the answer.
Okay
... the delta between the two. 'Cause pipeline is trending in the right direction, but we're being cautious at this point, given everything we know at this point.
Okay. Well, I don't want to get in trouble with Dave.
No, one last thing. One last thing on competitive is that. Remember that the Customer Identity Cloud business is a huge important opportunity for us, both just in terms of market opportunity, but in terms of establishing this broad platform. The competitive dynamic there is very different. It's build versus buy, and we have the best developer-focused platform, and that's a, it's a really exciting opportunity.
Okay.
Okay. We can go into some overtime here, but let's keep it as short as possible. We'll go over to Adam Borg at Stifel.
Awesome. Thanks for for fitting me in. Just on the, on the macro, you talked about, you know, seeing more pressure at the low end of the market. You talked about workforce and CIAM really being equal in terms of where you're seeing any headwinds. Just curious, anything by geography more? You talked about North America, you talked about EMEA. Anything else by geography or vertical to go into, just to flush it out? Thanks again.
Yeah, really, I mean, it's, you know, like you said, SMBs getting hit first with it. North America obviously is where we saw that the most, but that's also because that's our biggest portion of our business, right? EMEA did have a strong quarter, especially like I said earlier with those big deals. That's really the extent of what we're seeing right now.
Awesome. Thanks again.
No problem.
Over to Sterling Auty at MoffettNathanson.
Thanks, guys. Administrative one from my side. At Oktane, you talked about, you know, the fiscal 2026 long-term targets. Given the quiet period, you'd kind of address them now. Are you gonna just kinda table that discussion till you're a little bit further along some of the changes, or what should be the expectations on that front?
Yeah, we're gonna table that for now, Sterling. It's primarily related to the three things I talked about earlier, is making sure we see through these integration challenges, you know, the macro uncertainty out there, and then the change of go-to-market leadership. We wanna make sure that those things stabilize before we come back to it in the future and talk about that.
Makes sense. Thank you.
All right.
Peter Levine at Evercore.
Great. That just proves me, and I appreciate it. Maybe one thought, just a high level one is, you know, when you look across identity, endpoint or networking, in your opinion, what's more mission-critical? 'Cause I asked, you know, given the macro commentary, you know, obviously deals are elongating. It's not just you, but it's, you know, it's your competitors as well. Are these deals just getting pushed out, or are you actually seeing customers may focus on other areas of the security stack? Just curious to see if it's, if it's across or just particular areas within cyber. Thanks.
I think you picked out three that are all pretty critical. You know, when I work with customers, they're trying to shore up their identity strategy, especially around Zero Trust. If you wanna do Zero Trust, you have to know who can go where. Once you know. That's identity. You have to know who can go where and make sure you don't over-provision people, and then you wanna enforce that from the endpoint, you wanna enforce that from the network. That's the network folks and then the endpoint folks. They're all critical. I think I would say my observation is that it's more, it's not the criticality that gets things delayed, it's like the time to value and how deeply they wanna integrate.
In our case, you can deploy Okta very quickly, but if you wanna deploy it deeply and integrate it to every application, these big companies have thousands of applications and business processes across departments and divisions. A deep integration and deployment can take quite a long time. Same is true for some of these other tools and technologies. How they deploy them and how deep it is, that's more of a driver I think in terms of whether they go forward or not in a recessionary environment versus the actual just the category.
Okay. Thank you.
Okay. Trevor Walsh at JMP.
Great. Thanks, Dave. Thanks for taking my question. Todd, maybe best for you, Brett had mentioned the federal business as kinda one of the three priorities for the year, and noticed that you had announced the Okta for the US Military, launch earlier in the month. Just curious if that's... can you just double-click us around, is that a, an broad net new opportunity or more just kind of incremental to what you might already be doing with identity? Thank you.
Well, yeah, first of all, public sector is doing really well. Up the three quarters this year, up 65% over the three quarters, first three quarters last year. Which is great to see because it's something we've been focusing on for a while. I think specifically on the federal opportunity, the .mil instance of Okta, which you can now sell with the certification of IL4, you can now sell to the DoD for their use cases. It's more than incremental. It's a big new door to be open for us. We're waiting for the final paperwork to be returned on FedRAMP High, which is another federal certification that's super important. Yeah.
I mean, the government needs identity just like every organization and every sector needs identity, and that's a big area of focus for us, and we're glad to see some progress. Relatively speaking, we're still early days in that big opportunity.
Great. Thanks.
Okay. Our final question from Brad Zelnick at Deutsche Bank.
Excellent. Thanks so much for fitting me in. I guess most of the questions were asked, but I'll throw a big picture one at you, Todd. You know, it's great to see you continue executing against your vision of building out a broader platform with CIAM identity governance and PAM in the pipeline. Consolidation has been the siren song of many security vendors over the course of time, yet security as an industry remains highly fragmented. As we look out in the many years to come, why is consolidation a viable strategy today for you in identity, and why is it that Okta is positioned to be the winner?
I mean, industries naturally fluctuate between consolidation and fragmentation. I think the key is not to think about like, do you want to be fragmented or consolidated? The key is to think what are the right points of consolidation, and we believe identity is that point. We believe that if a company can consolidate their identity or across customers or around governance, around employees, then that'll enable integration to a very broad and diverse technology landscape which all these companies and organizations have. Most importantly, a broad and diverse and integrated security landscape. It's especially important in security because security is adversarial.
You don't wanna consolidate everything to one security vendor, you don't wanna get one log analysis, and endpoint, and identity, and network all from one company, because the attackers are going after that company, and you have no flexibility to swap out pieces and get your defenses more robust. We think the right point of consolidation is identity, and of course, that has some security capabilities, lifecycle management and multi-factor. Then that enables an tight integration to the entire security ecosystem, which will keep customers more robust and secure in the long term. That's why we think it's the right balance between the two.
Awesome. Thank you.
Great. Well, that's it for this afternoon. Before you go, we just wanna let you know we'll be at a few investor events this quarter. We'll be at the Needham Growth Conference on January 12th. We'll also be participating in several in-person and virtual bus tours over the course of December and January. We hope to see you at one of those events. That's it for our time. If you have any follow-up questions, you can reach us at investor@okta.com. Thanks.
Thanks, everyone.