Microsoft appears to have been on its best behaviour for a few years. Other than its heavy handed approve to Windows 10 updates it has been pretty good. But the knifing Okta, a cloud startup, from being a sponsor at its upcoming Ignite tech conference appears to be a return to form.
Okta CEO Todd McKinnon moaned to Business Insider that his outfit had sponsored the conference for years. Its main product helps companies manage employee passwords for a bunch of different cloud services, and it also helps them manage mobile devices.
But what appears to have happened is that Microsoft has recently introduced similar products and promptly unfriended the company.
Okta must be a serious problem for Microsoft. It did not ban all of its competitors from this show. Cisco is there and it heavily competes with Skype, as well as Yammer and other Microsoft products.
Amazon, Google, and Okta are the only ones not on the guest list McKinnon says.
Ignite will be held from September 26 to 30 in Atlanta. It's Microsoft's biggest annual customer and partner conference concerning its cloud products. Okta might be in trouble because it competes with Redmond’s newer products.
Okta offers a cloud service that manages a company's employee passwords, and related security needs, for using other cloud services. Companies use it to let their employees log in to Office 365, Salesforce, Adobe Creative Cloud, and 4,000 other cloud services. Okta recently began offering a service that tracks and secures a company's mobile devices, such as phones, tablets, and laptops.
However this is exactly the role that Microsoft sees for its Azure Active Directory (AD) and its even newer Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS).
The irony is that Okta is an Office 365 customer, and is a huge supporter. McKinnon said he loved the product and his outfit worked hard to make its product work with Office 365.
McKinnon is not convinced that this ban has come from the top. Microsoft's Office 365 team is still working closely with Okta's product team. Okta was just up in Seattle meeting with them earlier this month.
Redmond had to groups of people. There were those who understand the new way of openness and collaboration. “Then there's a few people in the company still fighting yesterday’s war, stuck in the 2000s and 1990s trying to fight everyone."
