Fast-Growing Cloud Management Start-Up Okta Hires Two New VPs

Cloud management start-up Okta has been growing like crazy during the last year. With the explosion of different cloud services aimed at businesses, Okta’s aim has been to tie them all together into a cohesive service with a single sign-on, a single place to set up and manage accounts for employees, and so on.

And the idea is catching on. While the company doesn’t say exactly how many customers it has, it did disclose today that the number of companies using Okta has tripled in the year and change since AllThingsD first talked to Okta CEO Todd McKinnon, a former engineering VP at Salesforce.com. Also, the number of total users has multiplied by a factor of six. New customers include Nestlé Purina, SRS Real Estate Partners, ShoreTel, Jazz Pharmaceuticals, Engis Corporation, Informatica and LegalZoom, among others.

Okta is also staffing up. Today it announced it has hired two new executives, one from BMC Software and the other from the Hewlett-Packard-owned IT security firm ArcSight.

Adam Aarons is joining Okta as senior VP of sales. His last gig was VP of sales at BMC. He got to BMC via its acquisition of BladeLogic. He’s been doing enterprise software sales for 15 years.

Hector Aguilar will be Okta’s new VP of engineering. He’s ArcSight’s former CTO and VP of software development. He joined ArcSight early, and did some of the early R&D work that led to its growth and ultimate acquisition by HP. He’s been doing networking and security development work for more than 16 years, and has a few patents to his name.

When we last heard from Okta, the outfit had just landed a $16.5 million B round from Greylock Partners and Khosla Ventures. Workday CEO Aneel Bhusri, also a Greylock partner, joined Okta’s board as part of that deal. Prior investors include Andreessen Horowitz, which led Okta’s $10 million A round.