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I’m the President of Product & Technology at Okta, leading global product, engineering…
Articles by Ric
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Reflections on Product Engineering Management
Reflections on Product Engineering Management
I am often asked by current or aspiring engineering managers (EM): "What do you look for in an engineering leader?" or…
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Hiring Frontend Engineers: Are you a future Medallian?
Hiring Frontend Engineers: Are you a future Medallian?
Private Message (PM) if you think you’ve got the mindset to be a Medallian. You can also apply here.
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Hiring - Oracle Marketing Cloud Data Engineering
Hiring - Oracle Marketing Cloud Data Engineering
Oracle Marketing Cloud Data Engineering I am looking for some rockstars to help build an engineering organization from…
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Ric Smith shared thisQ2 results are in. Our strongest quarter on record, outside of Q4. 🚀 What stands out most is how fast our product portfolio is translating into results. New products drove roughly 30% of Q2 bookings. We're turning the AI opportunity we outlined earlier this year into action. The customer conversation has moved from why agents need identity to how we secure them in production. We expanded Okta for AI Agents with Agent Gateway, Agent-to-Agent Connections, and Resource Access Certifications, moving governance from discovery into continuous, runtime control. Okta for AI Agents gained real momentum this quarter, from helping a Fortune 50 healthcare company meet HIPAA requirements to giving one of the world's largest asset managers least-privilege control over a fast-growing agent footprint. We also closed our acquisition of Permiso Security by Okta, which adds real-time visibility into agent behavior. Pair that with our growing Cross App Access ecosystem, now 25+ integrations deep with partners like Anthropic, Asana, and Atlassian, and customers have one place to discover, connect, and govern every agent in their enterprise, on any platform they choose. Kudos to this team for the pace of innovation. More to come at Oktane in September. https://bit.ly/4gkGax0 #OktaSecuresAI
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Ric Smith shared thisEnterprise access was built around users and applications. AI agents change that, yet only 34% of organizations apply the same identity controls to agents, leaving most without centralized visibility or audit trails. Agent SSO is now generally available to close that gap, bringing the open Cross App Access (XAA) standard into the identity product used by more than 20,000 Okta customers. Powered by XAA, Agent SSO registers every connected agent as a first-class identity in Okta's Universal Directory, right alongside human employees. This enables governance at scale by replacing static API keys with short-lived, least-privilege tokens while maintaining complete visibility, audit trails for compliance, and the ability to revoke access instantly. Agent SSO establishes the identity foundation by identifying agents and controlling their access. Okta for AI Agents completes the picture by discovering unmanaged agents, governing their lifecycle, and enforcing runtime controls. This delivers the continuous oversight required to secure the agentic enterprise. Read more here: https://bit.ly/4gbpTub. #OktaSecuresAI
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Ric Smith posted thisToday, Okta announced a definitive agreement to acquire Permiso Security, bringing together identity context, behavioral analytics, and threat intelligence to help customers detect and respond to identity threats in real time. Permiso brings more than 2,500 research-driven risk signals and advanced threat detections to help identify excessive permissions, unusual agent and tool usage, policy violations, and high-blast-radius activity across human, non-human, and agentic identities. Together, we’ll help security teams connect identity with runtime behavior, strengthening threat detection, posture management, and response across the enterprise. Permiso’s technology will also help identify supply chain threats in AI agent skills and prompts before they reach customer environments. The combination of identity context, runtime intelligence, and threat research will give customers a stronger foundation for securing AI-driven environments. Jason Martin and Paul Nguyen, thank you for placing your trust in us and for joining us on your next adventure. Read the full announcement here: https://bit.ly/45ySR0E
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Ric Smith shared thisWhen employees deploy AI agents, they create a web of background connections invisible to IT. Okta is surfacing these blind spots by expanding our Cross App Access (XAA) ecosystem to firmly place agent-to-app and app-to-app connections within the centralized identity perimeter. This expansion is anchored by our latest integrations with 25+ early XAA adopters, including Asana, Atlassian, Cloudflare, Cursor, Datadog, Figma, Slack, Zoom, and several other industry-critical applications. Built as an extension of OAuth and recognized as an official authorization extension of the MCP, XAA provides a standardized way to govern how AI agents connect to enterprise data. We’re already seeing this in action with Anthropic’s beta program last week, which enabled joint customers to begin leveraging Okta to help govern their use of Claude and its access to applications from participating partners that support XAA. By anchoring these workflows in Okta's identity engine, we are delivering central governance, removing standing privileges, and helping eliminate user consent fatigue. Excited to see this come to life. Together, we’re driving broader industry adoption and advancing the blueprint for the secure agentic enterprise. Check out the full announcement here: https://bit.ly/4guQQcI
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Ric Smith shared thisWe're thrilled to join OpenAI's Daybreak Cyber Partner Program. As we leverage their frontier cyber capabilities into our product development lifecycle, our engineering teams can shift from patch management to autonomous, sandboxed code hardening, shrinking vulnerability windows before code reaches production. This strengthens platform resilience for our customers and helps ensure that Okta remains secure-by-design. With attackers increasingly leveraging AI to find vulnerabilities, we're also using GPT-5.5 with Trusted Access for Cyber to harden our own infrastructure, supporting specialized cybersecurity workflows that help us move faster as defenders. The larger point is that as these models and agents become more powerful, identity and authorization become more critical. Organizations will need a vendor-neutral identity to help answer the foundational questions: where are my agents, what can they connect to, and what can they do. That's how we build secure agentic enterprises. Thanks to the OpenAI team for this partnership. Excited to build the future of cyber defense together.Ric Smith shared thisWe’re expanding OpenAI Daybreak to help democratize patching vulnerable software at machine speed: - Codex Security plugin: find, validate, and fix vulnerabilities right inside Codex - The full version of GPT-5.5-Cyber model: a strong model for trusted defenders - Cyber Partner Program: powering products built on top of our best cyber capabilities for 20+ leading security companies to secure the world's software - Patch the Planet: working with maintainers to secure critical open source projects With an update to GPT‑5.5‑Cyber, it’s now more permissive and more capable for advanced, authorized cybersecurity work. It is our most capable cyber model yet, with stronger performance on defensive workflows like tracing vulnerable code, validating issues, developing patches, and preparing evidence for human review. Codex Security brings these capabilities into real security workflows. Teams can run deep scans, validate findings, trace attack paths, build threat models, generate codebase-specific patches for review, and export into the tools they already use. We’re also launching the OpenAI Daybreak Cyber Partner Program with leading security software and services providers. Participating partners can use GPT‑5.5 with Trusted Access for Cyber in the security products and services they provide to customers. This helps their customers benefit from advanced defensive AI, while keeping direct model access with trusted partners. Our goal is to move beyond using models to find more vulnerabilities, towards a world of safer software and cyber resilience. https://lnkd.in/eTjgMDUw
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Ric Smith shared thisStrong Q1. Our newer products are driving meaningful momentum, with solid contributions across our portfolio. We're also seeing great strength in our ecosystem, as partner-sourced bookings accounted for multiple large-scale deals this quarter. Since Okta for AI Agents was made generally available at the end of April, we've moved fast. We’ve already extended the solution to support new agent platforms, work with any identity provider for human identities, and govern access to any resource type. As a truly vendor-neutral platform, we’re committed to partnering across the industry to build a new ecosystem for the agentic era. From our work with Google Cloud, AWS, and ServiceNow to Anthropic and OpenAI, we acknowledge that no single company can address AI security alone. Through some of our recent integrations, organizations can secure the full lifecycle of agents built on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore and gain deep visibility into identity risks within Claude environments. We’re giving customers the freedom to choose whatever technology best serves their business, while delivering the security foundation they need to lead. Read more here: https://bit.ly/4dHlApj #OktaSecuresAI
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Ric Smith shared thisAI agents are becoming production-grade integrations, and the old shortcuts are starting to show their limits. Manually hardcoded API keys and custom authorization logic don’t scale or help productivity…and they don’t give teams the visibility or control they need when agents start taking action. The next set of Auth0 for AI Agents innovations is here to help developers ship agentic apps safely at scale. What customers can now do: ✅ Deliver the missing identity layer for agents: With Agent as Principal, every agent can be assigned its own first-class identity so actions can be permissioned, traced, and revoked on its own terms. ✅ Secure agent-to-tool connections: As the first enterprise-grade identity platform to authenticate and authorize MCP clients, Auth for MCP ensures every agent operation on behalf of a verified user is scoped to the exact tools and APIs it needs. On-Behalf-Of Token Exchange is also available to help eliminate shared secrets and overpowered service accounts. ✅ Scale authorization and isolation: FGA Permissions Index enables high-performance permission checks so applications can filter large datasets, while Token Vault with Organizations Support helps multi-tenant SaaS teams isolate third-party credentials by customer. Proud of the Auth0 team for continuing to push this forward, and grateful to the developers and customers helping shape what trusted agentic apps require. Learn more here: https://bit.ly/3RyIJ4o
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Ric Smith shared thisOrganizations are deploying Claude at scale without the same level of visibility they have for other enterprise tools. As one of the select launch partners, Okta is now integrating Identity Security Posture Management with Anthropic's new Claude Compliance API. The AI revolution is moving fast, and your security needs to keep up! We are thrilled to announce that Okta is an official launch partner for Anthropic’s brand-new Claude Compliance API! We’re helping security teams lock down identities interacting with Claude by surfacing and remediating risks such as unrotated admin keys, offboarding gaps, and dormant accounts. By contextualizing Claude's activity with identity signals from across the enterprise, Okta helps ensure AI environments aren’t managed in a silo. This same identity-first approach extends to the agents organizations are building and deploying with products like Claude. Through Okta for AI Agents, agents receive first-class identities and are secured throughout their entire lifecycle, enabling companies to continue deploying AI at scale. Read more here: https://bit.ly/4fyAcIG #OktaSecuresAI
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Ric Smith posted this@Okta for AI Agents is now generally available. I’m extremely proud of the team behind this launch. Bringing a product like this to market takes deep collaboration across the organization and with our ecosystem, so thank you to everyone who helped build and deliver it 🙌 And to our customers, we’ve been listening closely to how you’re experimenting with AI and the security challenges that come with it as agents become a bigger part of how work gets done. Those conversations helped shape the blueprint for a secure agentic enterprise around three defining questions: Where are my agents? What can they connect to? What can they do? We’re now putting the blueprint into practice with Okta for AI Agents, with new features to: – Discover shadow AI agents, manage the identities of homegrown agents in a single source of truth, and import agents from popular AI platforms – Protect agent access with managed, least-privilege connections to five resource types, including apps, authorization servers, secrets, service accounts, and MCP servers – Govern AI agents across their entire lifecycle with access requests, certifications, audit logs, and a kill switch if one goes rogue ➡️Learn how to get started: https://bit.ly/4d4PDFU
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Ric Smith reacted on thisRic Smith reacted on thisOkta's Q2 results are in. $805M revenue, up 11% YoY. cRPO $2.585B, up 14%. $1M+ ACV customers up 22%. New products drove roughly 30% of bookings. The headline is AI and the layer underneath it. Every agent inherits an identity, runs on a device, and calls an app, and we secure all of it! #OktaSecuresAI Credit to the PMs, engineers, and designers across the org that make this happen everyday. You built the floor everything else stands on. Q2 results: https://bit.ly/4gkGax0 More at Oktane in September.Okta announces second quarter fiscal year 2027 financial resultsOkta announces second quarter fiscal year 2027 financial results
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Ric Smith reacted on thisRic Smith reacted on thisI am so excited that, Okta announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Permiso Security. With the rapid growth of Al agents and machine identities, attackers are increasingly using post-authentication techniques to bypass legacy defenses. When Al agents execute code, query databases, and interact across platforms autonomously, security teams cannot rely on static access controls. This is where Permiso comes in. Permiso addresses by analyzing research-driven risk signals in real time across 70+ integrations. The platform can identify anomalous agent behavior, advanced identity threats across both Okta and partner infrastructure, and using their Unified Identity Graph it can correlate threats and exposures across the entire Identity surface. I can't wait to welcome Jason Martin Paul Nguyen Sanjeev Williams Ian Ahl Phanikrishna Modali and the whole Permiso team. We are building the identity threat protection required for the future of the Enterprise. Read the full announcement here: https://lnkd.in/gfuZdzkU
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Ric Smith reacted on thisRic Smith reacted on thisI’m happy to share that I’m starting a new position as Vice President at Okta!
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