Arik Hesseldahl

Recent Posts by Arik Hesseldahl

Jive and Okta Team Up in the Cloud

Jive, the social enterprise and collaboration software company, and Okta, the cloud-based identity management outfit, said today that they’ve formed a strategic alliance to integrate their platforms.

What this means is that if you’re a Jive customer, you can start using Okta’s wide-ranging single-sign-on and identity-management service with it. From there, it’s probably a pretty easy pivot toward using it across all your other cloud and on-premise applications. Groupon was named as an early customer.

By my count, this is the second such strategic integration for Jive. The last I can remember is one announced in April with Box, the fast-growing enterprise file-sharing and collaboration platform.

It’s another step in building what they call the “new cloud stack,” and also an interesting move on the chessboard vis-a-vis other cloud companies, namely Salesforce.com.

Salesforce, the biggest cloud software company by revenue, has been agitating both Jive and Okta. Salesforce has been competing against Jive for some time, positioning its Chatter social collaboration app against Jive and Microsoft-owned Yammer. And, two days ago, Salesforce launched its Identity product, which is clearly aimed at competing with Okta.

Okta CEO Todd McKinnon, a former Salesforce exec, has said in the past how he likes having his old employer as a competitor. And, by the looks of things — a $27 million Series D round of funding being one of those things — business at Okta is about as strong as it could be.

Not to get all “Game of Thrones” about it, but Salesforce itself did a big platform integration with Oracle, as their respective CEOs went public with something of a summer bromance in June. I’m guessing that you’ll see more of these alliances and cross-alliances drawn in the coming months.

Latest Video

View all videos »

Search »

Another gadget you don’t really need. Will not work once you get it home. New model out in 4 weeks. Battery life is too short to be of any use.

— From the fact sheet for a fake product entitled Useless Plasticbox 1.2 (an actual empty plastic box) placed in L.A.-area Best Buy stores by an artist called Plastic Jesus