A group that was never one business

The three companies grouped together as identity and access management — software that decides who, or what, may enter a corporate system — do not sell the same product, and over the past month the market has started pricing them separately. BlackBerry gave back nearly a fifth of its value; SailPoint added almost a quarter; Okta finished the month where it began. For a year those differences were buried inside a flattering average.

Okta: the profits confirm, the growth does not

Okta sells single sign-on, multi-factor authentication and lifecycle management to enterprises and governments, plus the Auth0 developer toolkit for logging customers and machines into applications. Workforce identity is about 59% of contract value, Auth0 about 41%.

The operating story is genuinely good. In the quarter ended 30 April, revenue was $765m, gross margin held at 77.8%, operating income of $56m grew 43.6% on 11.2% revenue growth, free cash flow was $271m at a 35% margin, and net revenue retention inflected up to 107%. Remaining performance obligations rose 16%. Management reported the beat on 28 May and the stock rose 21% in a session. Company disclosures also put its "Okta for AI Agents" suite at roughly 30% of new bookings in the January quarter, the only hard number anyone has attached to the argument that software agents multiply the credentials a company must issue.

The growth line contradicts it. Quarterly revenue growth has gone 12.7%, 11.6%, 11.6%, 11.2%. Annual growth has fallen from 42.9% in fiscal 2023 to 11.8% in fiscal 2026. And company guidance for the July quarter is $790–794m, about 9% growth, with committed backlog up about 11% — deceleration, not the re-acceleration the tape implies. Consensus models roughly 10% revenue growth through fiscal 2029.

Verdict on the business: mixed — CONFIRMS on margins, CONTRADICTS on growth. On valuation it is cleaner. Trailing price-to-sales went from 4.62x on 3 May to 8.22x today and market value from $13.48bn to $24.64bn — an 83% re-rating against 11% revenue growth. At 105.9x trailing and 38.6x forward earnings for roughly 10–12% forward earnings growth, and with the mean analyst target still near $120 against $148 spot even after target raises to $165 and $175 explicitly citing agentic-AI identity demand, the multiple CONTRADICTS the fundamentals.

SailPoint: the one genuine divergence

SailPoint governs which employees, contractors and machine accounts hold which permissions — the audit-and-revoke layer above the login. It reported annual recurring revenue of $1.163bn, up 26%, with cloud recurring revenue up 36% to $781m, and raised full-year guidance to $1.27bn revenue and about $200m of free cash flow. The shares are nonetheless down 2.8% over twelve months and the $10.58bn market value sits below the roughly $12.8bn at which the company relisted in February 2025.

The qualification is the profit and loss account: the GAAP operating margin worsened to −28.5%, gross margin fell to 64.5% (depressed by acquisition accounting), and the net loss widened 60% to $74.7m. At 9.44x trailing sales that is not obviously cheap. Management also said about 10% of customers have adopted its AI features and the agentic pipeline is doubling, while stressing it is not yet material. And the recent move has no earnings behind it: the eight-session, 22% run followed a Wells Fargo buy rating dated 27 July, with results due around 1 September. Business CONFIRMS; the July price move is INCONCLUSIVE.

BlackBerry: a strong quarter, and not an identity company

BlackBerry's June quarter split $72m of QNX embedded automotive software and $74m of secure government communications out of $153m total — about 95% of revenue, none of it identity governance. The quarter itself was strong: revenue up 25.6%, operating income up nearly seven-fold, guidance raised to $594–621m. But full-year 2026 revenue was $549m growing 2.7%, against 9.05x sales and 61x enterprise value to EBITDA, and management flagged that a large Canadian government deployment is unlikely to repeat. The stock fell about 32% in July, its worst month in over three years, on insider sales including 125,000 CEO shares. Business CONFIRMS; valuation CONTRADICTS.

What the tape adds

Okta's 50-day average crossed above its 200-day on 8 June, ten days after the earnings beat, and has stayed there — a trend dated to a result. BlackBerry's uptrend, intact since 8 May, was cut back on 6 August. SailPoint has held an uptrend for only six sessions and failed a similar attempt in June. Behind all three sits an unresolved argument that software multiples fell below the S&P 500's for the first time on fears AI agents break seat-based pricing — the same fear identity vendors claim to be immune from.

The setup

Where it stands — One year of shared gains has broken into three separate stories, only SailPoint showing improving fundamentals against a flat share price.

Would confirm — Okta's July-quarter committed backlog growth printing above 12%, versus the roughly 11% management guided.

Would invalidate — Okta revenue growth at or below 9% with net retention slipping back under 107%.

Watch next — Okta reports after the close on 26 August; SailPoint reports around 1 September.

Valuation — Okta 105.9x trailing and 38.6x forward earnings, 8.22x sales versus 4.62x in early May; SailPoint 9.44x sales.