Simplify SaaS Management Through Purposeful Discovery, Management, & Optimization

Are Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications quietly proliferating and consuming resources within your organization? You’re not alone.

Compelled to continue innovating and growing, leaders are searching for new ways to increase agility, improve time-to-value, and reduce costs. As organizations reimagine operations in response to changing market conditions and efficiency mandates, SaaS offers clear advantages that enables them to collaborate and scale. Most, however, are now struggling to maintain control over their SaaS footprint and utilization — creating further waste, complexity and introducing risk.

Today, SaaS represents the largest and fastest growing software segment. For many organizations, the deployment and use of SaaS applications is a strategic decision meant to promote flexibility. A recent Forrester survey on IT priorities found that 57% of global decision-makers saw SaaS applications and SaaS investments as fundamental to implementing digital transformation strategies.¹

Flexibility can have a hefty price tag

This promise of growth coupled with SaaS’ other benefits have most over-consuming – purchasing more than the business needs. These siloed, team-specific purchases often lead to unmanaged contracts, auto-renewal surprises, or orphaned applications should those individuals leave – all the while potentially exposing sensitive corporate, personnel, or customer data.

When left unchecked, SaaS not only continues to quietly proliferate, consuming resources, but adds further complexity and risk. As the preferred delivery model for organizations, operational efficiency and cost optimization mandates have driven SaaS consumption and the need to better understand spend, usage, and security concerns of these solutions.

With hundreds of SaaS applications to manage, finance and IT professionals need a standardized way to analyze licenses, proactively manage contracts, and eliminate redundancies. Forrester considers the discovery of SaaS applications and costs, the assessment of usage by application and business function, and the rationalization and optimization of SaaS license contracts to be central to this process.²

Historically, organizations make this harder than it needs to be – relying on legacy record-keeping or contract management systems to identify deployed applications. This provides an incomplete picture, however, as it does not capture SaaS purchased outside normal procurement channels. Additionally, such systems and processes lack a consistent view of SaaS costs, usage, and impact necessary to make direct comparison and benefit evaluations.

Without these processes in place SaaS optimization and vendor rationalization decisions (see figure below) become nearly impossible because the organization lacks insight into the opportunity and migration costs associated with eliminating an application.² In short, organizations need help to manage SaaS effectively.

Lack of central accountability over SaaS licenses means that enterprises likely have multiple contracts for the same product or several products that are underutilized, negating the cost benefits of SaaS.

Apptio has the solution

Cloudability SaaS is a powerful SaaS discovery, management, and optimization tool. Employing direct API and single sign-on (SSO) integration, Cloudability SaaS automatically extracts SaaS, financial, and contract details for all SaaS deployed across an enterprise, enabling the business to make SaaS optimization, contract management, and cost efficiency decisions, while minimizing impact on business performance.

The platform also helps address security and data privacy concerns related to shadow IT quietly proliferating and consuming resources within the organization. Once ingested, Cloudability SaaS visualizes all SaaS spend and utilization data within your IT environment, empowering stakeholders to budget, report, and forecast against changing business needs. Further analyzing these data by user or departments allows for deeper license reallocation, rightsizing, or elimination decisions to be made. This single point of reference for finance, technology, and business helps users understand the cost, usage, and value of all technology investments, independent of whether or not those investments were made in or outside of the formal IT budget.

To learn more about Cloudability SaaS, visit our website.

Resources:
¹ Martorelli, Bill. “Best Practices for Software-as-a-Service Operations: The Need for SaaS Operations is High, Yet Enterprise Maturity is Lacking.” Forrester. October 22, 2020.
² Duncan Jones and Ted Schadler. “Webinar: Trim Tech Costs by Retiring, Replacing, or Renegotiating your SaaS App Portfolio.” Forrester. September 15, 2020.