Enterprise

Okta taps former Salesforce exec John Zissimos as chief digital officer

Zissimos joins the identity management software provider shortly after its acquisition of rival Auth0 for $6.5 billion

John Zissimos

John Zissimos is joining Okta as its first chief digital officer.

Photo: Okta

John Zissimos is joining Okta as its first chief digital officer, the company is slated to announce on Thursday. He will report to Chief Marketing Officer Kendall Collins who joined in March.

Most recently, Zissimos served as the vice president of brand, creative and media at Google. He is also the former chief design officer at Salesforce, where he reported directly to CEO Marc Benioff. Zissimos is hoping to do for Okta what he helped achieve for Salesforce: Take a mid-tier enterprise software vendor and turn it into one of the industry's most well-known brands.

"Most companies at this point in their [lifecycle] are stuck telling what things do. The best companies talk about who we are, what we do and how we do it," Zissimos told Protocol. "Creating an iconic brand is really about the 'why' of those three things. My job over the next 100 days is … to figure out what that is."

The comparison is particularly relevant given both of Okta's co-founders — Todd McKinnon and Frederic Kerrest — were former Salesforce execs. Collins, who also used to work at Salesforce, even believes Okta could surpass its $224 billion market cap.

For Zissimos, the crux of his marketing efforts to make that happen will focus on one concept: trust. It's a buzzword he said other organizations just list as a value, but one Okta has to embody in all aspects of its operations. The company provides identity management products, and its tech underpins many single sign-on systems within enterprises.

"The entire brand is built around that one word," said Zissimos. "They've done a lot of work to lay that out, but the next five years is going to be about taking that to the mainstream."

McKinnon, who currently serves as CEO, has pegged Okta's addressable market at $80 billion. It's one where the company faces competition on all sides, including from Microsoft, though McKinnon says the tech giant doesn't show up in many mid-market deals. On the startup side, burgeoning rival Trulioo just raised $394 million at a $1.75 billion valuation.

Zissimos joins shortly after Okta announced it would acquire rival Auth0 — a provider of tools to add identity management features in end applications — for $6.5 billion. McKinnon had pursued the company for years. And while he's bullish on the potential of the deal to expand Okta's go-to-market strategy to better target developers, investors still need convincing. Shares sank in the days following the March announcement but have since slowly crept back up.

Fintech

Judge Zia Faruqui is trying to teach you crypto, one ‘SNL’ reference at a time

His decisions on major cryptocurrency cases have quoted "The Big Lebowski," "SNL," and "Dr. Strangelove." That’s because he wants you — yes, you — to read them.

The ways Zia Faruqui (right) has weighed on cases that have come before him can give lawyers clues as to what legal frameworks will pass muster.

Photo: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Cryptocurrency and related software analytics tools are ‘The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic.’”

That’s not a quote from "The Big Lebowski" — at least, not directly. It’s a quote from a Washington, D.C., district court memorandum opinion on the role cryptocurrency analytics tools can play in government investigations. The author is Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui.

Keep ReadingShow less
Veronica Irwin

Veronica Irwin (@vronirwin) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol covering fintech. Previously she was at the San Francisco Examiner, covering tech from a hyper-local angle. Before that, her byline was featured in SF Weekly, The Nation, Techworker, Ms. Magazine and The Frisc.

The financial technology transformation is driving competition, creating consumer choice, and shaping the future of finance. Hear from seven fintech leaders who are reshaping the future of finance, and join the inaugural Financial Technology Association Fintech Summit to learn more.

Keep ReadingShow less
FTA
The Financial Technology Association (FTA) represents industry leaders shaping the future of finance. We champion the power of technology-centered financial services and advocate for the modernization of financial regulation to support inclusion and responsible innovation.
Enterprise

AWS CEO: The cloud isn’t just about technology

As AWS preps for its annual re:Invent conference, Adam Selipsky talks product strategy, support for hybrid environments, and the value of the cloud in uncertain economic times.

Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services

AWS is gearing up for re:Invent, its annual cloud computing conference where announcements this year are expected to focus on its end-to-end data strategy and delivering new industry-specific services.

It will be the second re:Invent with CEO Adam Selipsky as leader of the industry’s largest cloud provider after his return last year to AWS from data visualization company Tableau Software.

Keep ReadingShow less
Donna Goodison

Donna Goodison (@dgoodison) is Protocol's senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the 'Big 3' cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.

Image: Protocol

We launched Protocol in February 2020 to cover the evolving power center of tech. It is with deep sadness that just under three years later, we are winding down the publication.

As of today, we will not publish any more stories. All of our newsletters, apart from our flagship, Source Code, will no longer be sent. Source Code will be published and sent for the next few weeks, but it will also close down in December.

Keep ReadingShow less
Bennett Richardson

Bennett Richardson ( @bennettrich) is the president of Protocol. Prior to joining Protocol in 2019, Bennett was executive director of global strategic partnerships at POLITICO, where he led strategic growth efforts including POLITICO's European expansion in Brussels and POLITICO's creative agency POLITICO Focus during his six years with the company. Prior to POLITICO, Bennett was co-founder and CMO of Hinge, the mobile dating company recently acquired by Match Group. Bennett began his career in digital and social brand marketing working with major brands across tech, energy, and health care at leading marketing and communications agencies including Edelman and GMMB. Bennett is originally from Portland, Maine, and received his bachelor's degree from Colgate University.

Enterprise

Why large enterprises struggle to find suitable platforms for MLops

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, and as larger enterprises go from deploying hundreds of models to thousands and even millions of models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

Photo: artpartner-images via Getty Images

On any given day, Lily AI runs hundreds of machine learning models using computer vision and natural language processing that are customized for its retail and ecommerce clients to make website product recommendations, forecast demand, and plan merchandising. But this spring when the company was in the market for a machine learning operations platform to manage its expanding model roster, it wasn’t easy to find a suitable off-the-shelf system that could handle such a large number of models in deployment while also meeting other criteria.

Some MLops platforms are not well-suited for maintaining even more than 10 machine learning models when it comes to keeping track of data, navigating their user interfaces, or reporting capabilities, Matthew Nokleby, machine learning manager for Lily AI’s product intelligence team, told Protocol earlier this year. “The duct tape starts to show,” he said.

Keep ReadingShow less
Kate Kaye

Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of "Campaign '08: A Turning Point for Digital Media," a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.

Latest Stories
Bulletins