Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us. My name is Hamza from Morgan Stanley. With me, I have the pleasure of having the CFO of Okta, Brett Tighe, for a fireside chat. Before we begin, just a brief programming note on my end. For reports and disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley Research Disclosures website at www.morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. With that, Brett, thanks so much for joining us.
Happy to be here.
So you had a phenomenal Q4, CRPO growth accelerated. You raised the forward guide. A lot of good stuff in there. Maybe just walk us through what you had to do for that quarter to come together, because it certainly was a positive surprise for a lot of us.
Yeah, we're pleased with the quarter. It was a nice finish to fiscal year 2025, I think both from a top-line and a bottom-line perspective. Top-line, like you said, did accelerate for current RPO and total RPO to 15% and 25% growth respectively. Free cash flow margin was 42%, a record for us, which we're very pleased with. But ultimately, the top-line really came down to a few things. As you know, we've been working on a bunch of different initiatives over the last four, five, six quarters. One is continuing to improve the security of the company, become one of the most secure companies in the world. Made a lot of progress there. The other one is around new product introduction. You guys saw the statistics there. We had a really good new product quarter.
Improving our stance in the partnership community, that really lent a lot of positivity into the quarter. In 18 of the top 20 deals, you look at greater than 70% of the deals had partner influence. And then finally, furthering our specialization effort in the field. And so all of those coming together really created a solid Q3 and really a standout Q4. So we're pleased with how things are going. Got a lot of work to do, though. We're not saying job is done. We're going to make further changes because we feel like we can do better than what we did in FY 2025. And we're really looking ahead to FY 2026 and FY 2027 and 2028 to really improve things for the company.
That's great to hear. And it did feel like just during the call in general, the energy felt a bit different. I think Todd alluded to saying there'll be more blowout quarters like this, and you don't want to be a slow-growth company. And so when you think about the durability of double-digit growth and beyond, Okta getting back to that market growth or sustaining market growth, what's the confidence level, I guess, coming into calendar 2025 versus a year ago?
Yeah, I mean, we clearly are coming off of a pretty strong Q4 and a solid FY 2025. We're pleased with how things trended, but we still feel like we can be better, just like I was just saying. We need to do better. We need to make more improvements. We're not all the way there yet. I wouldn't get overly excited about one quarter or another. We need to generate a trend over several quarters, and we think we're making the changes that are necessary to really scale the organization to higher growth. That is ultimately our goal. We are not pleased with even 10% revenue growth. We want to be higher than that and also do it from a profitable perspective. We've done a nice improvement over the last couple of years from a margin perspective, and we want to maintain that and also continue to grow faster.
A lot of work ahead of us. We're excited about FY 2026 and FY 2027 and really everything out in front of us.
Yeah. Maybe just on a high level, right, this really does feel like the year of identity security, and historically, there's been different swim lanes in that market. Okta's roots are in the access management space, single sign-on and MFA, and then you have Identity Governance and privileged access management, which have their own sort of category leaders. Just curious from a high-level standpoint, what you're seeing from a demand perspective in all three of those and what Okta is trying to do to really become that one-stop shop?
Yeah, that is our goal is really from a workforce perspective, workforce identity perspective, is to create that one-stop shop. We've clearly been the leader for access. There's really three pillars, just to actually step back. There's access management, there's Governance, and there's privileged access. We've clearly been the leader for access management for a very long time. It's like you said, it's what made Okta who we are today. We've stepped into Governance and PAM over the last couple of years, Governance going a little bit further back. It's been one of our strongest product launches, if not the strongest product launch we've ever had as a company in terms of the ramp in total bookings. We still have some work to do on PAM. It's still earlier. It's only a few quarters old.
But we're excited about the idea of all three of them coming together to create really a solid platform for all of your workforce identity use cases. That is something that we're really focused on. And in fact, I was actually speaking with Arnab, our head of workforce, just the other day about this concept of we are incenting our team and want our team to really think about the cohesion between the three products as our strength. Yes, the individual products and pillars will be great in their own right, but the real value add to our customers and the exciting part for us is the cohesion between those three pillars, because we think each individual pillar will add value to the other pillar and really create a platform that our customers and potential customers in the future will gain a lot of value out of.
Yeah. And I think one of the misconceptions too, just on the access management side, is the competitive dynamic. And you had a pretty helpful slide on why you win against a certain competitor. Not to make you repeat that slide ad nauseam, but maybe just talk about the strategic importance of identity and why having a third party is needed?
Yeah, this is something we've hung our hat on for the entire duration of the company, all 16 years of the company, is being neutral and independent. We don't really care who you work with. We want you to be able to choose whatever solution works best for you and be able to connect to that so that your workforce can be able to get the value out of whatever they're using on a day-to-day basis. It is very simple. If you create a conflict of interest, oh, we want to hold you in on this platform or that platform, you're not going to get that freedom of choice. You're not going to get that leverage. You're not going to be able to get all the value out of all of these best-of-breed and variety of types of technologies.
That is something that is foundational to what we ultimately want to continue to drive for our customers. And it's embedded in what I was just talking about, frankly. That level of integration, that level of cohesion is something we want to create for our customers. And some of the other older providers, maybe single-stack providers, really will never have the ability to do that because they have an inherent desire to keep you on their platform. We want you to be able to move between platforms. We want you to be able to have that freedom of choice and, frankly, maximize your value as an organization.
Got it. From an AI standpoint, so there's a couple of different things that you're doing there. There's the AI agent piece, I guess, on the workforce side. And then there's Auth for GenAI. And there's some things that you're doing on the CIAM front. Maybe on a high level, can you explain how Okta is becoming an important AI enabler for enterprises?
Yeah. I mean, we look at AI as the next frontier in identity. Agents and AI have a very similar problem, if not the exact same problem as human identity. Who has access to what when? Well, what has Okta developed over the last 16 years? Exactly that, either on the workforce side or on the customer identity side. So we feel we're very well suited to be able to get after those use cases, be able to address those use cases, be able to solve them as best we can. We are still very early on in the journey.
I mean, one of the new products coming out here in the next few weeks, actually going early access to a couple hundred customers, a lot of customers, actually, a couple hundred customers just in early access, ranging from small startups all the way to Fortune 100 customers, is Auth for GenAI, where we can embed identity into agents. And we're really excited about a variety of things associated with AI, but that's our newest product that's coming out. And really look to see how it does in the next couple of quarters and hopefully update all of you guys on its progress because it's an exciting new area because it is, like I said, that new frontier in identity is AI.
Yeah, it really feels like it's a force multiplier to some extent. To the extent that you can talk about it, how do you think about the monetization around that? Because I guess today you're largely pricing on seats.
Yep.
I guess you could say an AI agent is somewhat like a machine, somewhat like a human. It can behave in non-deterministic ways. So when you think about going to your customers and trying to monetize the value for that, how do you think about that?
That's actually one of the things that we're going to figure out in the next couple of quarters in early access. We have some theories because you're absolutely correct. There are situations where it could look and ping the service a lot or just every now and then. And if you think about the way we price today, there's licenses on the workforce side. There's MAUs on the customer identity side. And you could see agents actually taking characteristics of both. And so we need to figure that out over the next coming quarters, next few quarters with our customers, what their propensity to buy is and what we feel the right margin profile for us as a company looks like. So it's going to take us a little bit of time, but that's a great question, Hamza.
Yeah. Well, interested to hear more about that. Just on the workforce side, traditionally, Okta has been a seat-based pricing model. There's going to be other vectors for monetization. But we've had this environment where you're unfortunately still seeing headcount reductions in certain areas of the economy, and pricing. There's generally been pressure, not an Okta-specific comment, but just generally in the market, so one of the things that you had been speaking to heading into 2025 was just around the stabilization that you're seeing on renewals.
Yep.
Just curious what that's looked like so far in 2025?
Yeah. So in FY 2025, you guys heard me talk about this over the last couple of quarters where we've been facing headwinds from a seat upsell and a monthly active user upsell, whether it be mid-contract or at time of renewal. And we've been seeing that from those older customer cohorts that date back to maybe more of a COVID era. And we see that starting to abate here as we go through the first half of this year. We think by the time we get through Q2 of this year, most of those headwinds will be behind us. But look, yeah, if we have an economic downturn, then maybe my opinion changes a little bit. Or the opposite is maybe if we have an economic upturn or upside, maybe it goes a little faster or we see a little upside as we go through FY 2026.
So it's definitely been a headwind. We're looking forward to getting behind it. And hopefully, we don't have to deal with it anytime soon.
I know you love being a macro guy, but as far as every day, just as far as when you think about your guidance, right, you just ended this past year at 15% CRPO growth. The guide for the year is 9%-10% on revenue. To what extent have you factored in any improvement on upsells or renewal or net retention rate into your guide or not?
From a net retention perspective, we'll go backwards there. Net retention, what I said on Monday was based on our forecast, based on the mix of business of new business versus upsell, how things are trending from a pipeline perspective, how we see specialization, because that's definitely as we further specialize the field, there is an impact to the business from that perspective. We see net retention plus or minus a point from here for the balance of FY 2026. But in general, the biggest thing in our guidance, everything that we're thinking about is really continuing to focus on those things that we talked about earlier, making the security of the organization even better. We've made a ton of progress in 2025. We're going to make even more in 2026. We feel like we've really started to turn that into an advantage for ourselves, both internally and also with customers.
Next one's around new products. We want to continue to push there. Partners making a lot of progress, but we're still in early days with specific parts of the ecosystem, but good signs across the board, and then further specialize in the field. Those are the four things we started working on those four or five quarters ago. We're going to continue to work on them through FY 2026. You saw the results in Q4, so we're confident in our ability to replicate or at least do well in FY 2026, have a nice FY 2026 out in front of us.
Yeah, certainly looks like it. And just to be clear on the comment around the guidance, you're not reflecting any of that, let's say, increased optimism in the guidance. Certainly doesn't seem like it, given where you ended the 15% CRPO growth and how you're guiding for this.
No, we are being conservative. But like I talked about last quarter, we have reduced the level of conservatism in our guidance for a variety of reasons. But the main one is there's just less items to put in the conservatism bucket, if you will. And that main one that I was just talking about is around specialization of the field. We saw what happened last year. So we're taking that into account into FY 2026. And so we think we're being appropriately prudent, but not overly so.
One of the other new disclosures that you gave out in the last few quarters was the % of new bookings coming from the emerging identity products. Maybe just, I think that number was 20% this past quarter. Could you just give us a high level of what are the primary components in that? And then when you do go to a customer and you sell them one of those products, what does the ASP uplift generally look like?
Yeah, it was greater than 20%, just to be clear. Not just 20. So you got to give us the credit, greater than 20. But yeah, we're really excited about that. That's actually showing some really positive things in the organization, that products developing market-leading products, and then we're able to market it and actually show the value to our customers. Everyone always just thinks about the value to the customers and the sales part of it, but there's a whole flow that you need to focus on to be able to make a product successful, and so the biggest part of it is Governance of that 20%. Also, we talked about 15% last quarter. It's Governance. I mean, it's the oldest product of the new products. So by definition, it's going to have a better shot because it's a better product. It's more mature.
We've got it in the field longer, all that sort of stuff. And so that is definitely the biggest portion of that greater than 20% stat that we have been talking about. But a lot of people have asked me in the last couple of days, well, what's second? Well, the good news is there's actually a bunch of products that are tied for second. You guys have probably all heard of these, but I'll run through a few of them, which is you've got Privileged Access. You've got Threat Protection. You've got Posture Management in there. You've got Device Access, Fine-Grained Authorization, Highly Regulated Identity. There are a lot of new products that our company has developed over the last couple of years that are starting to really gain traction. And what's exciting is there is no second. There's a lot of seconds.
And I think that's what's interesting about it is that not all of them are going to turn out great. Let's just be very clear about that. But there's going to be a couple in there that are probably going to turn out pretty well. And that's what we're excited about. It shows we're developing a lot of different avenues for growth in the long run. These are still very small. They're not material to NRR. They're not material to the revenue guidance that we gave on Monday. But they are going to, likely a couple of them in the next few years, become more material. And so that's what's exciting for us is it's not just one out there or two.
There's a bunch of them out there that are vying for second, and we're seeing the traction in the market and look forward to executing on those as we go through 2026 and beyond.
Another question, and I'd love to open up the audience for Q&A as well. You talked about some changes that you made from a go-to-market perspective, and you alluded to those a little bit, but maybe if you could elaborate on those a little bit more, and to what extent is that creating any sort of near-term disruption and how you've thought about that in the guidance?
Yeah, the changes that we've made, we've been making slow changes over the last couple of years. So specialization is something we really fundamentally believe in because we believe focus is very important for our field. Our product, if you go back, let's say, three to five years, our product depth wasn't what it is today. On both sides of the customer and workforce, the products are so much more deep, so much more technical that we feel specialization is necessary in the field. Our first foray into specialism happened several years ago. It's public sector. You guys have seen that over the last few years. We've talked a lot about public sector. There's been a lot of positivity and growth in that segment for us. So we know specialism works because we've seen it work for several years.
Then, the introduction of the U.S. and the U.S. small and medium-sized business segment, we introduced Hunter Farmer. So basically, reps who go after new logos versus those who farm the install base. Those two will continue into FY 2026. In fact, the Hunter Farmer will actually expand into other regions outside of U.S., but still at that small and medium-sized business segment. With the further specialization that we're introducing in FY 2026, we'll be by product, which is Okta versus Auth0. So if you think about enterprise, you think about strategic, those will be more specialized. Not everybody, but for the vast majority of them, they will be specialized by product. And so going back to what my original comment was here is we know that focus works. We saw it in FY 2025 with U.S. small and medium-sized business, Hunter Farmer. We've seen it in public sector.
We're just further specializing the field. There are a lot of things that we've learned over the years of what it takes to specialize in go-to-market. We've put that all into the guidance that we gave yesterday. We are being prudent, but like I said, not overly prudent. We have not been overly conservative. That's all baked in.
Any questions in the audience? Just raise your hand. Okay. I'm not seeing one.
Huh, so you guys are a shy group. There's like 120 of you.
This is a clean quarter, I guess. There's no questions.
Do you guys want a pair of socks so we could go get some of those for you?
I would like that, actually.
Don't know, so you got to get them.
Yeah.
You got to come up branded. We're not on video, but everybody in the room can see it.
Oh, those are nice. Well, maybe while we wait for some Q&A in the audience, since you did bring up federal, yeah, I hate to have you bring this up again.
Yeah, no, come on. Let's talk about it.
I think there was a tweet around DOGE about, and I know public sector has been a big growth driver for you guys in recent years, but just curious, how are you thinking about that? What do you think from a pipeline standpoint, just given what's been some pretty drastic changes there recently?
Yeah, we saw the tweet as well. And we're not going to talk about individual customers, but I would say in terms of alignment with the effort to modernize and make the government more efficient, we would love to help. We'd love to be the wall-to-wall provider of the United States Federal Government for identity. So we would welcome that opportunity. If anybody wants to come call us and talk to us about it, we're happy to do that. We are a product that I think aligns very well with what the DOGE effort wants, right? They want modernization. They want security, and they want efficiency. That is something that is in our sweet spot. We've been doing it for a very long time. And we think there's a lot of opportunity. There's a lot of legacy there. There's a lot of security things that we can help with.
There's a lot of efficiency things we can help with. We definitely feel excited about that opportunity and expect a lot out of it over the next coming few years.
Yeah, and it just seems like you're still very early days in terms of penetrating that vertical as well. So I guess to highlight that a little bit more, what you're trying to say is they want to be more efficient. They have to modernize, likely move more to the cloud, which the public sector has a lot to do. And that's where Okta really comes in.
Yeah, yeah, we're excited about the opportunity as more and more of those agencies and departments want to modernize. We're here to help.
I'll go back to the audience. Anyone has a question? Oh, we got a question back here. [Gordon], go ahead.
Hello. Oh, sorry. Can you spend a minute just going through the difference between Auth for GenAI versus fine-grained authorization? How do those two work? Are they similar? Is it wrapped for an AI agent use case, potentially?
Yeah, that's a good question. One is part of the other in concept. So if you think about what do agents have a problem with, right? It's who has access to what. So what that is, is authentication and authorization. So Auth for GenAI just combines the two. So fine-grained authorization and authentication. You basically just have to understand, okay, that's the agent I want to let in the door. Now, what does that agent have access to? So it's a really insightful question in the sense that authorization is a component of Auth for GenAI. That's why we're so excited about it. We think that there's a lot of possibility for a lot of use cases across the ecosystem.
Anyone else? Maybe just a quick one on the channel. Historically, Okta has been very easy to deploy, right? And I think that's been one of the great things about it. But as you go into these larger enterprises, more products, how are you involving the channel in that conversation and how have you had strategies for that change?
Yeah, that is definitely something we have become much more focused on over the last year or two. And we want to continue to focus more on the channel in terms of the opportunity for them. I mean, the opportunity for them is to try to show their customers a lot of value and show them the best products in the market, which we believe we have. On top of that, they obviously want to make money doing it. And so some of these new products really lend themselves to having more partner involvement because take, for example, Governance, right? Our Governance product is really good out of the box. It's easy to program, doesn't take you two years and a bunch of hard work and a bunch of customized code. A lot of it just works. Turn it on.
But a lot of what Governance is, is figuring out who do you want to have access to what. That's all Governance is. What access do you want to give and when do you want to give it? It's real simple. So, programming that's actually fairly easy inside of Okta. But determining, Hamza, should you have access to this application versus me having access to another application. That's all it is. And so going through that work is really an opportunity for partners to make money because they can actually say, okay, I've dealt with these five different healthcare companies. And we know that these type of people should have access to these types of apps. So they can go to their customer and say, hey, this is what we've seen at other customers and gain leverage.
So not only make money off of it, but actually create leverage for their own business. So there are a variety of those opportunities inside of our new products where the product does work really well out of the box, but we actually offer the opportunity to our partners to help them help their customers get as much value out of the product itself. So we're excited about the opportunity with partners. And we saw some really good traction in Q4. It doesn't matter which stat you looked at, 18 of the top 20 deals, greater than 70% participation in the deals. It was really good. But we're still early days. Just to be very clear on partners, we have to do better. We have to continue to show value to the partner ecosystem. And ultimately, that's going to pay dividends to us in the long run.
There's been some pretty significant improvements on the profitability side in recent years. I should definitely mention that. But one of the things that I was surprised by earlier this year, at least, was there was a workforce reduction. And I really felt like, and the quarter showed that Okta was focused on re-accelerating growth. So maybe just walk us through how you're balancing the durability of growth while also finding areas of efficiency. What are those areas?
Yeah, the goal we've had for the last couple of years is to build the pillars of margin expansion. And you've seen that over the last couple of years with some really significant margin growth. But at the same time, the goal has been to not get overly focused on margin because our goal is to grow faster. We're not pleased with 10% growth at the top end of the guide. We think we can grow faster. And so what we have been doing over the last couple of years is building those margin pillars, but so that we can actually reinvest some of that money back into the business. And you can actually see that at play in FY 2025 and FY 2026, even in the guidance that we've given. In FY 2025, we poured money on the effort to become one of the world's most secure companies.
I mean, poured it on. We put a bunch of money in there. We've made a ton of progress. Still not done, like I was saying earlier. We still got a lot of work to do. But we did that at the same time while also expanding margin at a very healthy rate. You flash forward to FY 2026. There are things that we were doing in the business to actually accelerate the investment in those areas, but you also still see very healthy margins. So we feel like we've done a lot of hard work to get our margins to where they are. And we're pleased with them. And we're comfortable with where they are. But we can also take money out of the business and put it into growth while also creating these great margins. So it's been a lot of work for the last couple of years.
I'm really proud of the organization. It has not been something we just did overnight.
Maybe just to ask an AI question from a different angle, are there any ways that you're using AI internally to drive those margins?
That is actually one of the areas that has been helping us. We're still early days in that as well. But one of the areas that we have been actually using it for quite some time is on the engineering front, having copilots in there and helping write the code. It's been a nice little productivity gain. Another area that we actually just released, pretty exciting, is something to help our IT team answer questions from our employee base. So there are thousands upon thousands of questions that our employee base asks every year to our IT team. And now we have AI helping us answer those questions without having to get a human involved. And obviously, once it gets to a certain point, we have to help there. But it is little things like that that have been helping us increase the margins over time.
We're really excited about the potential as we move forward.
I'll pause once more for if there's any Q&A from the audience.
We're going to go more authorization?
No, sorry.
No, no, let's go.
Can you just spend a? There's $100 million of Governance and then $300 million of Workflows plus Lifecycle. I guess I was a little surprised by the second number. What are the big components of the 300? Is it more one or the other? Is it pretty equal?
The 300 is a combo of Lifecycle Management and Workflows. Is that what your question is? What the mix is?
Yeah. And maybe just talk about the traction or success there. What's led to that?
Yeah, so if you remember our history, we started out with Lifecycle Management, and Lifecycle Management is pretty much like pre-organized Workflows, right? And Workflows are just more customizable. That's the real difference between the two, so it's been a journey on both, and yeah, they're both a healthy part of that $300 million. It's not like one's like $290 million and the other's $10 million, right? It's been a pretty healthy mix of the two. So we're excited about it, and that just shows the size of our Governance business. I mean, it's $400 million in total. We thought that was maybe potentially a surprise to a lot of you, and hopefully, it satisfied some interest in how big that business is because we want to make sure you guys know how big it is. It's really been a success for us over the last several years.
I would actually go so far as saying if you were to look at some of the most successful products we've had, they've been in that arena over the last couple of years.
Just from a capital allocation standpoint, I mean, you guys are generating a lot of cash now. Historically, there's been some tuck in M&A. Obviously, identity is a big market. And you're a consolidator there. There's also opportunities, I'm sure, for things like share buyback. But just how are you thinking about prioritizing?
Yeah, we're really proud of the balance sheet we've been able to build over the last several years. First priority is run the business. So we're going to make sure we have enough cash to run the business. The other side, the second piece is really what you just said. We're going to continue to be opportunistic around M&A tech tuck-ins, something we can accelerate our roadmap. A lot of the major product releases we've had over the last several years, including the ones we were just talking about, had some component from a roadmap accelerating tech tuck-in. We know we're really good at them. And we're going to continue to do those. So nothing of real size, but just kind of focusing on that roadmap acceleration. And then the third one is around the debt. We've got one tranche coming up here this year.
Our intent is to pay that off in cash and then be opportunistic with any potential takeouts on either 25s or 26s. So that's how we see the capital allocation going forward.
Just a final question. I mean, Todd always talks about this being not just a multi-billion-dollar business, but a $5-$10 billion revenue business someday over the longer term. Just confidence level around getting there based on the products that you have, based on the go-to-market changes that you've made, just how are you feeling about that today versus this time sitting a year ago?
Yeah, and I would say on the back of a good Q4, that always helps, right? But we think we're making the right changes to scale the business to get to where we need to be, which is that $5 or $10 billion number that he's talked about. And obviously, there's still more change that we're going to have to make. But we feel really confident with the decisions we're making today and look forward to executing in the coming quarters and years.
All right. Well, Brett, I know you're oh, go ahead.
You got a question? Fire away, man.
Go ahead. [crosstalk]
Yeah, sorry. You talked about the Auth for GenAI on the CIAM side. What are you guys doing on the workforce side to address agents?
Yeah, yeah. We're working on that as well. We're not quite as far as the Auth for GenAI side. But it is definitely something we're interested in. And think about Auth for GenAI. That actually, in a lot of ways, will be pinging workforce applications, right? It won't just be consumer applications. So we're definitely very excited about the opportunity across agents in general.
OK. I think we're all set. Well, Brett, I know you're back to back today. Again, congrats on another strong finish to the year. It's a privilege having you here. Best of luck with the rest of 2025.
Thank you, Hamza. Appreciate it.
Thank you.