Google to use Okta as its preferred identity provider for Google Apps enterprise customers
Google Apps will use Okta as its preferred identity provider for enterprise customers — Identity management vendor Okta and Google have announced a partnership aimed at getting enterprises to secure their users' identities in the cloud.
Context & Ripple Effects
Earlier in 2016, Google had already widened its single sign-on beyond its own apps, adding support for Microsoft Office, Facebook at Work and Slack to the SSO solution. The Okta partnership is the next step: rather than forcing its own directory on enterprises, Google designates an independent identity vendor as the preferred provider for Google Apps customers, betting that familiar identity tooling lowers the barrier to moving users to the cloud.
The arrangement also reads as a bridge. Within a year Google bought Bitium to build up its own cloud identity management capabilities, and by 2018 it began offering that technology as a standalone identity service outside G Suite — meaning the preferred-provider slot Okta occupied became a product Google would eventually compete in itself.
First-order effects
- Enterprises deploying Google Apps get Okta as the default identity layer, giving Okta direct distribution into Google's enterprise customer base without a separate sales cycle.
Second-order effects
- Microsoft's competing identity stack loses a distribution channel at the moment of Google Apps adoption, pushing suite vendors to treat identity as a bundled feature rather than a third-party add-on.
- Okta hedges against being disintermediated by deepening the platform — extending two-factor authentication across all single sign-on customers in 2017 and later shipping Okta Platform Services — while adding partners like Facebook's Workplace through Project Onramp.
Third-order effects
- Identity becomes the control plane of cloud productivity: suite vendors first rent credibility from dedicated identity providers, then absorb or replicate the capability in-house, squeezing independent IdPs toward platform breadth and non-Google partnerships to stay relevant.
The trend: Cloud productivity suites are turning user identity into their core integration layer, pulling dedicated identity vendors in as partners before becoming their competitors.