Corporate Logo for Bold New Cloud Computing Company

Okta (http://www.okta.com)

Okta is a bold, silicon valley, on-demand software company delivering a product that helps enterprise IT organizations make the move to SaaS and cloud based computing. (apps like salesforce,com, google apps, webex, go to meeting, etc..)

We are very passionate about delivering a product that is as easy to use as a consumer website (google, yahoo, ebay, flickr, facebook, etc..) but delivers robust functionality for employees, IT, and business executives.

To do that we offer a complete solution with a catalog of pre-integrated applications and deep integration with Active Directory that provides IT centralized user provisioning, access management, and reporting. Every employee gets a personalized, Okta single sign-on home page for all of their applications, and business executives get critical reports on application usage and ROI that give them insight into the value they are getting from their investments.

The Okta team has built, marketed, and sold market leading, on demand solutions including Salesforce.com, Successfactors, and Rearden Commerce and is backed by premiere silicon valley angel and venture investors.

The name "Okta" was chosen specifically because it is an actual meteorological term that is a measure of cloud coverage in the sky (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okta). In effect our solution is helping customers manage their cloud coverage.

We are targeting forward thinking IT organizations within businesses that range from 150-3000 employees and are aggressively adopting this next generation of SaaS applications. These are mid market organizations, not big Fortune 500 companies.

Our customers tend to be early adopters of technology and some of the biggest users of key SaaS applications such as Google Apps, Salesforce.com, Cisco Webex, Citrix GoToMeeting, etc...

We market and sell to a few different type of people within those companies:

1. Director/Head of IT that has responsibility for ensuring that he know who has access to which ones of these applications, and wants to make sure that they use these cloud applications without violating any of their internal security policies.

2. SaaS Application Administrators - these people are the current administrators of these applications, and want to make their lives easier and not spend as much of their time on adding users, resetting passwords, and other mundane tasks that Okta can automate

3. AD Administrators - They manage the internal directory (Active Directory) which controls which users have access to which applications. They want to continue to use AD, but also extend it to these new cloud applications. Okta allows them to continue to work the way they to today, and seamlessly extends their work to this new class of applications.

We have an existing logo today that we did not spend a lot of time focusing on initially. It is "ok" but does not stand out and definitely does not leverage any visual cues to help communicate what Okta is about. We also think the font is moderate.

As we move to launch the company more aggressively to the public, re-do our website, etc.. we want to create a bold new logo that captures the essence of what Okta is about:

1. Leading this new move to SaaS and cloud based computing for forward thinking enterprises
2. Empowering IT organizations to LEAD, not IMPEDE the move that these companies want to make to the cloud.
3. Delivering a very robust, dependable, enterprise class on-demand solution (our CEO built the salesforce.com engineering organization which is arguably the most successful SaaS application to date.)
4. Delivering #3, but with a software solution, user experience and design that is VERY easy to use, approachable, intuitive, and is much more like using a consumer web site such as google - than a tradttional, difficult to use piece of enterprise software from a company such as Oracle, IBM, SAP, etc..

We also are in the unique situation of having a name that actually means something that is very relevant to what the company actually does!!! So, it would be interesting if there was a way that the design of the logo could also help communicate that.