Okta has announced the findings of its sixth annual Businesses @ Work report, which explores how organisations and people today are using technology from an enterprise standpoint. According to Okta, over the years, businesses are deploying more apps for a growing number of purposes. As a testament to that, the number of apps per customer increased by 6%, and 10% of Okta’s customers are now using over 200 apps for their business operations.

In a blog post, Okta’s CEO and Co-Founder, Todd McKinnon said, “As more businesses build and protect digital experiences for their workforces and customers, we’ve also seen a gravitation toward technologies that enable choice and flexibility, with a healthy dose of data usability and security. We saw a shakeup of new apps dominating the workforce, with Snowflake, Atlassian Opsgenie, and Splunk all making the list of fastest-growing apps for the first time.”

Todd added that best-of-breed collaboration tools, such as Zoom and Slack, which were both absent six years ago when Okta first published the report, have now joined the ranks with long-standing collaboration suites such as Office 365 and G Suite. Meanwhile, social media apps such as LinkedIn and Twitter, as well as the likes of GoDaddy and GoToMeeting, which used to be quite popular a few years ago, are absent from the list.

Todd states that this clearly shows how employees now prefer flexibility and functionality across the board.

Interestingly, MS Office 365 and Salesforce have held the top two spots for six years in a row, while for the last three years, AWS and G Suite held tightly to the third and fourth spots respectively.

Here are the top 15 most popular enterprise apps for 2019 based on the number of customers:
1.      Microsoft Office 365
2.      Salesforce
3.      Amazon Web Services (AWS)
4.      G Suite
5.      Atlassian Product Suite
6.      Slack
7.      Zoom
8.      Box
9.      SAP Concur
10.   Cisco Meraki
11.   DocuSign
12.   Zendesk
13.   GitHub
14.   Dropbox
15.   Lucidchart

While there was much focus on security and collaboration apps back in 2018’s list (with Slack and Zoom occupying the top two spots), 2019 saw the rise of data- or security-focused tools, with six newcomers dominating Okta’s current “fastest-growing apps” list. The six apps are Snowflake, Atlassian Opsgenie, Google Cloud Platform, Splunk, Looker, and Envoy.

At number one, Snowflake did impressively by recording a whopping 273% growth year over year. The company was also named Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Data Management Solutions for Analytics, proving that they’re on to bigger things going forward. Other notable data-related tools include Splunk (#4), and Looker (#6), which was recently acquired by Google.

AWS may be number three in the “most popular apps” list, but Google Cloud came up strong last year by recording a 108% year-over-year growth. According to Okta, while a third of customers are deploying AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform, the number of customers choosing to integrate more than one cloud is growing steadily, signalling that we’re definitely in for a multi-cloud future.

Okta’s list for fastest-growing apps is as follows:
1.      Snowflake (273% y/y)
2.      Opsgenie (194%)
3.      Google Cloud Platform (108%)
4.      Splunk (102%)
5.      KnowBe4 (89%)
6.      Looker (86%)
7.      Jamf Pro (82%)
8.      Envoy (80%)
9.      Freshservice (77%)
10.    Zoom (76%)