Zylo’s Top 3 Takeaways From Gartner ITAM

Earlier this week, the Zylo team had the privilege of attending Gartner’s #GartnerITAM Summit in Grapevine, TX. The Summit, which was titled, “The Art of Influence: Optimizing Costs and Leading Transformation”, brought together individuals from across the spectrum of IT Management, from Finance to Procurement to Asset Management and Vendor Management.

The conference focused on specific IT and Procurement challenges to meet executive demands for high levels of rapid growth. At the Summit, we learned what’s required to create and sustain a culture that drives growth, agility, and business value.

Gartner shared 2 fascinating stats that are forever changing the IT function:

According to a survey among >$1B companies, IT Budgets account for 4.3% of a typical company’s total spend. Marketing Technology (2.2%), Other Business Units (1%); 75% of technology spend is outside of IT budgets.

IT Budgets have a 1-4% growth rate per year while Business Unit tech spend is mid double digit growth rate with light oversight; In turn, value has become more important than cost.

As the IT landscape continues to shift, we believe it’s important to adapt and understand the changes. Because of this, we’d like to pass along 3 key takeaways from #GartnerITAM to those that didn’t have the opportunity to attend. To all those in SaaS, whether buyers of subscription-based software, such as the teams and titles described above, sellers of SaaS products, or perhaps a combination of both, take note of these takeaways:

1. Create Value In The Face of Disruption

Procurement and IT teams need to become the trusted advisors to the business and work to create top-line value as well as bottom-line savings. They need to become value generators for the business and move away from having a reactive approach to new technology towards being proactive in the face of disruption.

2. Build Vision And Influence For Business Transformation

As Procurement and IT teams have a front-line view to the transformation happening across organizations, especially as related to SaaS and subscription-based technology, they have a very unique opportunity to bring siloed functions together to drive cross-functional value. When technology across departments shares the same data, it streamlines processes and creates visibility that otherwise would result in siloed data, presenting a terrific opportunity to embrace transformation.

3. Drive Value In The New IT Ecosystem

The days of IT managing back-office software and infrastructure is changing with the advent of subscription-based applications. Now, as described in Gartner’s statistic shared above, many purchasing decisions for SaaS and other subscription-based software happens without direct IT involvement. While this is a change for IT and procurement teams, it also presents an opportunity for them to focus on larger, more strategic initiatives such as ensuring the entire organization is interconnected, rather than focusing on menial tasks such as installations and software updates.

The Future of IT

It’s not IT’s fault if there is no technology transparency, nor is it the fault of business units that now make their own software purchasing decisions. Rather than dispute the changing landscape, IT can use the opportunity to focus on business strategy and drive complete transparency into the organization. Without transparency, stakeholders see IT as a black box.

Traditional Software Asset Management (SAM) Tools Won’t Cut It

According to Gartner, IT cost optimization is continuous. The work is never complete as systems and applications change constantly. How do IT teams keep up with this?

Traditional SAM tools were built for on-premise software licensing, and were managed by IT. They focus on license detection, supplier audits, budgeting information and data center management. However, as the growth of SaaS is prolific, and departments, business units, and even individuals are evaluating and purchasing subscription-based software without IT’s involvement, traditional SAM tools are no longer able to keep up and do not provide the insight and value they were once able to.

Zylo’s SaaS Management Platform looks at spend and utilization across the entire organization. Our team is building a cloud-based platform from the ground up for everyone across the organization, from Finance to IT to Procurement to the C-Suite team, to manage the new way that software is now purchased and deployed. Zylo is changing what Software Asset Management means to everyone in the industry.