Okta has released its ninth annual Businesses at Work Report. The report is based on anonymized data from Okta’s more than 17,000 global customers and the Okta Integration Network, which includes over 7,000 integrations with cloud, mobile, web apps, and IT infrastructure providers. The top categories were travel, business supplies, and design.
Business supplies — a category that didn’t even break the top 10 in last year’s report — also showed tremendous year-over-year (YoY) growth, with a 35% increase in customers and a 77% increase in unique users.
From the report: This year’s fastest growing list features a diverse pool of apps, ranging from tools for collaboration, communication, corporate travel, and HR to a cloud platform, a developer tool, and a security tool. In fact, the big winner this year is Kandji, an Apple mobile device management tool, with 172% YoY growth by a number of customers.
Organizations rely on a large, diverse set of apps to deliver on their mission, and large companies (> 2000 employees) lead the pack with an average of 211 apps apiece. Companies continue to add best-of-breed apps — such as Zoom, Slack, and Box — on top of productivity suites.
And
This year’s data shows that the growth in multi-cloud adoption that has been visible since 2017 shows no sign of slowing down, and the favorite pairing of Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform continues to gain traction.
The app usage data is a reliable proxy for what areas of technology are growing. Collaboration, HR, and communication – are all important elements of the productivity layer. Cloud, development, and security – this all makes sense.
The growth of the apps themselves means that there are service opportunities related to all of them. Thus “adding best-of-breed apps” is code for “make money on services here.”