Customer Success Story

Green Tech Leader Persefoni Uses LeanIX For SaaS Contract Management

Industry

Technology

Headquarters

Arizona, US

Employees

290+

Results

Obtained full visibility into application usage by employee and department
Gained an overview of contract details and SaaS contract renewal schedules in a single place
Increased accuracy of predicting overall spend by department

The Challenge

Limited visibility and outdated SaaS management

Lengthy manual processes for budgeting, forecasting and SaaS contract management
No master list of applications by department with spend
Over a dozen SaaS renewals to manage, track and process each month

Persefoni is a global leader in climate data disclosure and management. The company’s Climate Management & Accounting Platform (CMAP) provides businesses, financial institutions, and government agencies software to manage their climate-related data and decarbonization strategies.

With CMAP, organizations can meet ESG goals and climate disclosure requirements by automating carbon accounting. Users can seamlessly calculate and disclose their carbon footprint to multiple stakeholders and perform climate trajectory modeling.

Persefoni’s IT landscape is 100% SaaS-based. Established in January 2020, the company grew rapidly in a short period of time and had to quickly scale its application portfolio. In just a couple years, Persefoni had almost 200 applications in their stack.

Persefoni, headquartered in Arizona, is a global leader in climate data disclosure and management.

In many ways, rapid growth is a good problem to have. However, the inevitable application sprawl made SaaS contract management, forecasting and budgeting difficult. Any kind of application inventory or budgeting process was still done manually, using spreadsheets.

Continuous SaaS stack growth meant Persefoni had a dozen or more renewals per month to track and process. Collecting important information – such as total cost of ownership, license usage and spending, subscription renewal dates, and application usage by employee and department – was arduous and time consuming.

Kim Stroh, Co-Founder at Persefoni, describes a chaotic experience. “We had to manually look in multiple different places to find out what contracts we actively had and when the contract end date was. We were keeping track of all this information in spreadsheets, which isn’t the best idea, to say the least.”

"We had a contract that IT didn’t know about or track, and the end user who used the app didn’t understand that there is a notification period to avoid an auto-renewal. This cost the company several thousand dollars for another year of software the user didn’t want or intend to use in 2023," Stroh adds.

Kim and the team at Persefoni knew they needed a better strategy. They needed a single place where they could view all of their applications, access contract renewal information, and visualize spend and budgeting.

For that single source of truth, they turned to LeanIX’s SaaS Management Platform (SMP).

“As an enterprise architect, I had previously done some research in EA and APM tools, and so we had a list of features that were important to us. We really drilled down into three or four different candidates. At the end of the day, LeanIX had more potential and more things ready to go in the areas we needed."

Kim Stroh,
Co-Founder and CDIO, Persefoni

THE LEANIX DIFFERENCE

Seamless SaaS management with SMP

Full visibility into application usage by employee and department
View contract details and renewal schedules in a single place, via visualized reports
Accurately predict overall spend by department

Through LeanIX SMP integrations with Okta, Google SSO and Netsuite, the company was able to flag applications that were in use but were not part of the IT budget. The cost for the applications were technically software or data related but did not reside under IT. They have since been able to pull those services under the IT budget for more accurate spend tracking. They were also cut wasted spend by uncovering applications they didn’t realize they were still paying for. In fact, they estimate that they weren’t even aware of about 10% of their applications.

Persefoni now uses LeanIX SMP to supplement their contract life cycle management system so that IT can review, redline, and e-sign contracts. Stakeholders can seamlessly view and track contract timelines in a single place without manually searching for them. This helps tremendously in determining where and when significant costs are going to occur throughout the year.

Previously, they had to go to multiple different places to see what contracts were actively in place, when the contract end date was, and if the contract should auto-renew or be renegotiated with the vendor. Now, they can easily pull contract data to create committed spend reports with intuitive visualizations of how much they will spend on SaaS throughout the year.

"For accounting, we can see when the biggest payments will go out, which is very important. If an annual subscription comes up for renewal that costs $300,000, versus one that's a monthly charge spread across the year, that's very important to know when managing our cash and providing information to departments."

Jamie White,
Application Portfolio Manager at Persefoni

Persefoni also found that 5% of all services discovered with LeanIX SMP were unauthorized applications. This visibility helped Persefoni’s IT team change the process on how application purchases and usage are reviewed and has even helped strengthen security measures for how users access applications.

Data from LeanIX informs Persefoni’s monthly review meetings to make data-driven decisions and uncover optimization opportunities, including freeing up licenses, identifying unauthorized IT, de-duplicating solutions and realizing cost savings.

This type of recurring meeting with accurate, actionable data and insights from LeanIX can significantly enhance governance and ensure companies get what they signed up for in their SaaS contracts.

“Working with LeanIX and talking through how we think about IT budgeting has been a really good experience. Having a vendor partner we can walk through different challenges with and who provides valuable feedback confirms to me that we made the right choice.”

Morgan Garritson,
Director of Digital Operations, Persefoni