Okta's backlog reaccelerated, with booked demand now outrunning recognized revenue. RPO rose 17% to $4.86B and current RPO 14% to $2.59B, both above 11% revenue growth. Identity is the lowest-hanging AI value layer: whoever wins at building AI, every agent will need a trusted identity and controls over what it can access, as Okta's founder says. x.com  x.com 

Microsoft's salesforce and governed platform unlock AI spending at conservative firms. Faster enterprise than consumer AI adoption makes it effectively the only pure play. M365 Commercial may top 20% growth next quarter, sooner than expected on tonight's guide; GitHub resegmentation helps, but it should do so this year anyway. Azure and M365, two-thirds of revenue, should grow above 50% and 20% and may accelerate. $24-25 CY27 EPS remains achievable, implying under 22x forward earnings. x.com  … Show more

Okta is unlikely to sustain mid-teens growth, and valued on free cash flow including stock-based compensation it trades above 40x. Workforce identity grew 11%, and although cRPO rose 14%, it is at risk from layoffs, whether AI-driven to free up token budgets or efficiency cuts. Whether margins flatline in the high 20s is still to be seen. x.com  x.com 

Okta and SailPoint should benefit as AI agent traffic explodes, because agents generate vast numbers of requests for tiny files, which favors identity security rather than bandwidth plays. At about 8-9x sales they are not superficially cheap, but with change spanning orders of magnitude and business models that scale well, they could trade around 15x today and return about 300% over time. Cloudflare, by comparison, trades near 40x. The long-avoided theme is about to light up. x.com 

AI is turning security spending from optional to essential, and beats from CrowdStrike and Okta confirm it. CrowdStrike's Q2 revenue rose 26% with record net new ARR of $333M, up 51%, and raised guidance; Okta's RPO reached $4.86B, up 17%, with a second guidance raise this year, after Fortinet also raised. AI agents and coding widen attack surfaces, Morgan Stanley estimates up to $220B of added security demand, and buyers are consolidating onto platforms. x.com  x.com 

Okta is losing in identity security even though the category should grow in 2026. Microsoft Entra and CrowdStrike are eating its enterprise business, AI-native Opal and Astrix are building what Okta should have built three years ago, and net retention is falling. After 18 months of repositioning the market stopped listening, and the Lapsus$ breach still hurts. It is not cheap enough to price this in and looks like a value trap, though a buyout rumor or less-bad quarter could squeeze shorts. … Show more

Microsoft is a dominant compounder at a highly compelling valuation because investors underestimate M365's resilience and Azure's growth. At 21x forward earnings, roughly the market multiple, the price ignores its ~27% OpenAI stake worth about $200B. M365 is embedded in nearly every large enterprise, backed by hard-to-replicate security and identity infrastructure, costs about $20 a user versus over twice that for separate apps, and grew 15%. Azure grew 39%, with modest acceleration guided. … Show more

Security, identity, observability and data governance are the less crowded side of the enterprise AI stack and should benefit as open models make AI cheaper. In multi-model setups, switching models gets easier, but rebuilding years of access controls, audit logs, proprietary data pipelines and internal workflows does not. Hardware remains scarce and critical, but names such as Palo Alto Networks, CrowdStrike, Fortinet, Okta, Datadog, NetApp and Snowflake sit around the model. x.com 

Okta's risk/reward is no longer attractive after doubling in three months, at 10 times FY27 sales and over 50 times earnings. Even if agentic AI products reach half of its 20,000 enterprise customers within two years with a 40% contract-value uplift, implying 13-15% annual sales growth, it is not cheap; a 50-60% uplift and 17-20% growth still isn't. Agentic AI is exponential, so the growth duration may be underestimated, but two-thirds of the position has been sold. x.com 

Agentic AI, which completes tasks autonomously rather than just answering questions, is the next $1T software wave and is happening now. Microsoft is putting Copilot agents in every Office seat; Salesforce's Agentforce has $800M ARR, up 169%, across 29,000 deals; ServiceNow sells workflow agents on a raised 2026 outlook; Palantir builds autonomous defense intelligence agents; Cloudflare provides edge delivery for deployed agents; and DigitalOcean supplies infrastructure for agentic workloads. … Show more