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Everything about what SaaS Management (SM) is, why you should know about it, what are the key benefits, and what best practices to get started.
► Find out what to look for in the SaaS Management platform!
SaaS evolved from the growing need for centralized computing during the 3rd industrial revolution. Salesforce’s “The End of Software¹” campaign in 2000 and Concur’s resistance to a floppy disk and CD-ROM production invited a world of app services delivered via the internet.
This led to an explosion in cloud computing for the everyday person and inexpensive, web-based business licensing models. As history shows, disruptive advances invite both chaos and challenge, alongside productivity and growth.
And solution for the SaaS chaos? Welcome to SaaS Management.
SaaS Management is a practice of monitoring and managing Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications within an organization's technology portfolio. It lets you reliably discover SaaS apps, monitor license usage and spending, proactively manage renewals, and track compliance in an automated and scalable manner.
One business practice that combines all of the processes required to efficiently scale cloud software, extend businesses' strategic objectives, and account for users' needs while upholding data security and privacy standards.
No more need for using spreadsheets to keep records of all SaaS applications, the SaaS Management platform rather uses advanced discovery methods for complete visibility of your SaaS portfolio, e.g. integrations with ERP, HR, financial and contract systems, SSOs, and direct SaaS integrations.
For many, SaaS Management adapts those processes once used to manage perpetual, on-premise software and modifies them to fit the realities of the SaaS subscription model with actionable insights
Where existing IT asset management and software asset management tools break down for full-scale SaaS management, new platforms from a variety of specialized vendors simplify the SaaS systems management effort.
It enables IT, finance, procurement, and security leaders to work together and grow a business with informed decisions. Which consequently means a cost-efficient and secure organization.
Accessibility, high adoption rate, lower costs, easy upgrades, and smooth integrations are the initial SaaS benefits. Once organizations subscribe to hundreds of SaaS vendors and implement multiple instances & licenses, the original promise of SaaS can quickly deteriorate.
Some of the challenges the SaaS model brings are:
Too many companies only focus on the transition to "cloud-first". Then, they face a new problem: limited visibility and control once SaaS consumes their business.
There is a problem since we’ve never been taught how to control and manage SaaS portfolios, plus many organizations rely on incomplete CMP or direct vendor analytics — SaaS application is not software on-prem or a typical IT Asset.
Besides the SaaS challenges mentioned above, software vendors also continue developing new technologies, changing pricing structures, and expanding features to feed the appetites of cloud-crazy companies, LeanIX expects even more spectacular SaaS adoption in the next decade. At the same time, Gartner² expects 85% of enterprises to operate ‘cloud-first' by 2025.
Employees and departments love to buy and adopt new SaaS technologies because it’s fast, easy and it enables them to increase their productivity when they are in need of results. Therefore, it’s not surprising that a typical employee uses 44³ SaaS apps to do their job.
Unique SaaS vendor management is required since purchasing has become easy, decentralized, and way more uncontrollable for the leaders than it needs to be.
White Paper
Introducing the discipline of SaaS management, key drivers for its use, and how it can mitigate the risks of sprawling SaaS landscapes.
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SaaS Management gives a complete picture of all SaaS subscriptions, user licenses, owners, contracts, renewals, and costs. It also captures vital usage trend data enabling informed decision-making about renewals and future investments.
The beauty of SaaS is when 30% of subscriptions are unused, it gives companies an option to not renew or renegotiate SaaS agreements in the next contract period. Complete visibility was the initial use case explored by SaaS Management platforms, and it remains the main one.
SaaS managers can use the usage data to determine whether organizations are receiving value from SaaS investments. Following SaaS spend optimization process together with actionable insights allows them to remove excess vendors, licenses, and redundant SaaS solutions that are not needed.
SaaS Management insights are used to drive discounts, e.g. by consolidating multiple Salesforce instances and contracts, or to yield savings during a competitive bid process for exclusivity, when using Webex, Zoom, GoToMeeting, and Skype for video conferencing.
First, SaaS management enables control over SaaS security threats with shadow IT discovery. Integrations allow tracking of any SaaS purchases happening across the departments一even the ones bought through corporate credit cards.
Secondly, access to an organization’s sensitive data is secured by automatically identifying and de-provisioning licenses with employees that already left the company.
Having full SaaS visibility enables leaders to identify SaaS vendors that comply with the organization’s policies and ensure compliance with regulatory requirements, such as, GDPR, SOC2, and others.
Continuous SaaS stack growth means companies have multiple renewals per week to process. SaaS Management saves time by having all the renewal information in one spot一ownership information, usage data, contract value, and renewal dates (renewals calendar).
Finance, procurement, and IT analysts are able to switch from active to proactive approaches. They are notified with automatic alerts of when renewals are due and answer questions, such as:
Employee onboarding and offboarding take time, especially when the complete SaaS portfolio is unknown. SaaS Management insights speeds up recognition of which applications a person leaving was signed up for and automates the IT request process to ensure employees receive the software they need to do their job quickly and with minimum impact on IT resources.
SaaS Management software enables users to recognize the value of SaaS investments and ensures the employees are getting the most out of them.
It provides insight into whether users are fully adopting new solutions and can uncover areas where training or an internal comms campaign can help. This is done through fine-grained tracking of which features are being used by each user.
Let's see how these benefits can be achieved by the SaaS management platform.
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Report
SaaS Management Survey 2021SaaS management tool brings the programmatic discovery of what SaaS is in use, who owns it, and what the company is obligated to pay for through hundreds of integrations.
These insights are useful for tracking and record-keeping, but they also prove if SaaS delivers the value/ROI it is supposed to. Companies are able to build a system of record that captures the variety of characteristics of each SaaS vendor.
Discovery exposes issues of unclear SaaS ownership. Enterprises find it difficult to build a renewal case, for example, when there is no budget owner or champion. Clarifying ownership adds accountability for adoption and utilization benchmarks.
With the SaaS inventory analysis, IT, Finance, and InfoSec leaders can:
Programmatic SaaS discovery of SaaS applications proves to be the most effective way to control SaaS sprawl.
You know your business and which areas are noticeably undisciplined—likely losing money or failing to generate a return from their investments. The market of SaaS management tools out there is growing and each one has its differentiators, therefore it’s necessary to know how to get started:
Defining your SaaS Management business case is the key to success. When you know what you want to achieve, and why, you can get the necessary buy-in. LeanIX suggests aligning views internally with:
Stakeholders need shared objectives—this starts with expectation setting at the executive level that cascades throughout the business. Defining these objects is a set of collaborative experiences. Interested stakeholders (ideally, with varying levels of seniority) can work together to broadly discuss opportunities for the business to improve. Then, project leads can work tactically to deliver these.
C-level leaders should discuss main challenges including issues of risk, compliance, value-creation, employee engagement, and/or cost-reduction. These may be prioritized, quantified, and assigned clear targets. A task force of IT, finance, HR, and security leaders may then be assigned to evaluate SM platforms and map out an implementation plan.
SaaS Management marketplace features a crop of innovative platforms working inside both startups and Fortune 100 companies. Platform capabilities do vary, however, LeanIX finds that platforms’ support of the benefits discussed earlier often differs.
Understanding platform capabilities is essential to finding a right-fit solution. Often, platforms seem the same; however, vendors emphasize a variety of features or functions and prioritize certain business drivers, like visibility, differently.
Below, we organize sample sets of vendor discussion topics. Verify these in the context of your business goals during an SM platform evaluation:
While the deployment times vary based on the project complexity, enterprises generally have a platform running four to six weeks after contract signing.
To ensure swift onboarding secure a company-wide alignment around the problems that SM intends to solve, allocate internal resources for this initiative, compile input information about SaaS estate, and share documentation around any past attempts to solve SaaS management.
No matter how mature your SaaS management processes are–from reasonably defined to non-existent–it’s not too late to expand control.
Smart businesses are moving en masse to SaaS Management to restore both the value promise of cloud applications and mitigate debilitating security and compliance issues. The importance and sense of urgency to become a more agile digital business are clear.
¹ https://www.provokemedia.com/latest/article/the-launch-of-salesforce-com-and-the-end-of-software
³ Statistics are taken from 2019 The State of SaaS Business Spend report conducted by Cleanshelf (now a part of LeanIX).
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