Okta's New Capabilities Should Help Accelerate Sales Growth, Macquarie Says

04:40 PM EDT, 09/25/2026 (MT Newswires) -- Okta's (OKTA) new identity management capabilities should help accelerate sales growth at the company, Macquarie said in a note sent Friday. At its recent customer conference, the identity security company introduced new "Okta for AI Agents" capabilities that let businesses deploy AI agents fast while maintaining visibility and control. Okta's Agent SSO -- or single sign-on -- framework eliminates the use of non-expiring keys and allows enterprises to swap "long-lived (application programming interface) keys for short-lived, identity-governed tokens," the company said. This brings the cross app access protocol into Okta's identity platform. Macquarie has become more bullish on the identity security company being able to sustain revenue acceleration. "We left the conference incrementally more optimistic that agent SSO and cross-app access are poised to drive cross-sell in the Okta base, and that Okta for AI Agents is poised to gain meaningful traction in the emerging agentic identity market," Steve Koenig, US head of software and services research at Macquarie, wrote. "Accordingly, we're more confident on sustainable revenue acceleration for Okta." Okta on Tuesday announced the Blueprint Alliance, a multi-vendor coalition that aims to help companies secure their AI agents. "Okta's goal with the Blueprint Alliance is to expand the agentic AI market across open standards, so that risk signals can trigger coordinated actions across several control planes," Koenig said. The alliance can be successful if customers demand the interoperability provided by the Blueprint." Okta's share in the identity protection market remains stable at about 30%, according to the Macquarie note. Okta Chief Executive Todd McKinnon told an investor session that agentic identity protection presents a significant opportunity and could be its "next wave" of growth, Koenig said. Macquarie raised its price target on outperform-rated Okta shares to $240 from $185. The stock declined 5.5% on Friday, but has soared 126% so far this year. In August, Okta reported an 11% year-over-year increase in overall second-quarter sales to $805 million, with subscription up 12%. The company expects full-year revenue of $3.216 billion to $3.226 billion, compared with the FactSet-polled consensus indicating $3.22 billion. Price: 196.16, Change: -10.48, Percent Change: -5.07