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As a Software Asset Management (SAM) professional, having control and oversight of your software and licensing is critical to eliminate waste and operational logjams. But the proliferation of SaaS across your business makes this a constant challenge – from underused software licenses and redundant software to unregulated purchasing.
Today, many SAM pros have attempted to manage SaaS using spreadsheets or legacy software management tools. But they haven’t worked. Namely, they require manual effort and are often inaccurate and unreliable.
Instead, you need a SaaS Management Platform (SMP) like Zylo to maximize SaaS utilization and simplify audit procedures effectively. An SMP provides a complete and always-on view of your software assets, enabling your organization to capitalize on technology investments while upholding compliance and governance standards.
Today, some of the world’s most innovative brands – including many Fortune 25 companies – depend on Zylo to help build and drive successful SaaS Management programs.
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Learn MoreEfficient software asset management is pivotal for managing the financial and security risks of your organization’s software. Discover six reasons why Zylo turns software asset management from a tedious practice to a powerful driver of business impact – and a boost to your career!
Visibility is the bedrock of effective enterprise SaaS Management, as it sets the strategic direction for the rest of your program. In short, you can’t programmatically manage licenses and renewals until you tackle visibility first.
Part of gaining that visibility is by building a SaaS system of record. In the past, this typically involved using spreadsheets or legacy SAM tools. The challenge with those methods is that they are prone to errors and oversights while being labor and time intensive. Because they fail to capture every application, especially those acquired by employees, they can lead to unmanaged compliance and security risks, license waste, and overspending.
With Zylo, it’s significantly easier to create and maintain a SaaS system of record. Using advanced AI and financial discovery, Zylo identifies and categorizes all applications in your inventory, including shadow IT—unauthorized apps that bypass traditional monitoring. This automation ensures comprehensive and accurate software management.
Vinod Vishwan, Sr. Director, Head of Business Planning & Operations at Adobe, explains the criticality of visibility to Adobe’s software management program. “Visibility into our portfolio was table stakes for the success of our program,” said Vishwan. “We could not begin to manage our software if we could not understand the full scope of it.”
Adobe Drives Innovation and Massive Savings with Zylo
In the past 4 years, Adobe has rapidly scaled from $9B to $18B. This growth has made an already complex environment even more complex. Learn how they leveraged Zylo to get complete visibility into their SaaS portfolio, unlock millions in cost savings and avoidance and improve the employee experience.
Fragmented and disparate spending data make it difficult to track and interpret expenses across departments and forecast budgets accurately. As such, this can lead to budgeting errors and complicate financial planning, making effective resource allocation challenging.
Gartner’s® 2024 Magic Quadrant for SaaS Management Platforms™ even states that, “Through 2027, organizations that fail to attain centralized visibility and coordinate SaaS life cycles will overspend on SaaS by at least 25% due to unused entitlements and unnecessary, overlapping tools.”
Accurate budgeting and forecasting has never been more important. And that’s where Zylo Discover comes in. The industry’s first standalone SaaS discovery and inventory solution, it enables you to directly address budget challenges, prevent wasteful spending, and ensure wise investment and resource allocation.
Zylo’s AI-powered discovery engine provides continuous, centralized visibility into all your SaaS applications and spend, uncovering hidden costs and risks to put you back in control of your SaaS environment. Centralizing your spend data makes it easy to track and analyze spending patterns and identify unnecessary or duplicate software purchases.
In addition, Zylo makes it easy to calculate cost per user and streamline the showback process with Cost Allocation. Promote accountability for software spending within departments and enhance IT budget management and financial planning.
Expensed software purchases by employees – commonly known as shadow IT – present significant risk and compliance challenges for SAM professionals. They not only bypass your standard procurement process, but they are more likely to make your organization more vulnerable to security risks. In fact, according to our annual report, a startling 73% of expensed applications are rated with a “Poor” or “Low” risk score, highlighting the widespread vulnerability within enterprises.
Instead of remaining blind to these applications and their associated risks, visibility is critical. Zylo significantly enhances your ability to monitor and mitigate these risks. It starts by finding those unknown apps with Zylo Discover. On average, we find that companies underestimate what they’re spending on SaaS by 304%. Once Zylo uncovers your shadow IT applications, it enables you to enact formal governance over software acquisitions.
In addition, Zylo Security Detail, powered by Netskope, offers detailed risk scores and identifies regulatory compliance gaps across your software inventory. That way, you can quickly understand potential vulnerabilities and compliance risks and address them proactively.
Use Zylo to improve your security posture and ensure that all software assets align with corporate security policies and compliance requirements.
Due to limited time and resources, SAM pros typically concentrate on managing licenses for the company’s top 10-15 applications. However, ignoring longtail apps used by business teams can result in considerable financial and operational waste. To put this into perspective, at large enterprises, 56% of licenses go unused on average, costing about $127M annually.
While eliminating waste from a longtail application may seem insignificant, the cumulative impact is substantial. Considering that applications from lines of business and employees add up to 72% of total SaaS spending, it’s an area of opportunity you should take advantage of.
It’s hard to pivot your mindset from just managing your short tail to all apps. Joe Ryder, Senior Manager of Software Asset Management at McKesson, explains why it’s hard to escape this mindset.
“There’s a lot of risk in the Tier One vendors. [SAM pros aren’t] really focused on the smaller vendors and don’t realize that the long tail spend ends up being more impactful if you take it as a whole,” said Ryder. “So there’s just an attention suck from those very risky, very large contracts where they’re not able to pivot over to the smaller ones.”
The answer: Use Zylo to scale license management across your entire software portfolio with automation. Between the centralized usage and license data, and automated insights and license reclamation workflows, Zylo makes it easy to strategically optimize your software assets. Our robust license management solution includes:
Genesys Leverages SaaS Management to Further Digital Transformation
See how the leader in cloud customer experience and contact center solutions reinforces software asset management and enterprise architecture with Zylo.
Organizations often report software savings intermittently. When they do report, the focus is on substantial cost reductions from core IT-owned applications. Unfortunately, they exclude smaller savings wins that seem insignificant by themselves but make a huge impact cumulatively.
Without a comprehensive system providing a big-picture view, you could miss opportunities to reduce your software costs. Not to mention, not accounting for smaller savings opportunities also underrepresents the value of Software Asset Management’s efforts.
Instead of ad hoc savings tracking and reporting, use Zylo Savings Center. It makes the process easy by automating savings tracking from various activities, such as canceling unnecessary applications, benchmarking, and implementing deprovision workflows. At the same time, it allows you to create your own custom savings events, ensuring comprehensive tracking.
In addition, the reporting and dashboard capabilities native in Zylo allow SAM professionals to effectively communicate savings to executives. You’ve put in the hard work, so it’s critical that you demonstrate the financial benefits of your efforts. Highlight the strategic value of SAM by providing insights into all savings and fostering a culture of financial improvement.
Managing application onboarding and offboarding is challenging, particularly for applications outside standard Software Asset Management control. Without the proper processes and tools, this can lead to inefficiencies and security risks.
For instance, employees might not have the tools they need for their job, negatively impacting their productivity. Alternatively, former employees may retain access to sensitive company resources after departure, putting you at risk for a data leak.
Zylo enhances onboarding and offboarding with two features:
By using Zylo, companies can streamline onboarding and offboarding, ensuring precise execution and safeguarding resources and security. This helps you maintain control over your SaaS environment and securely and efficiently manage personnel transitions.
Don’t let the complexities of SaaS Management overwhelm your SAM team. Our team at Zylo is here to help you get started.
With its comprehensive tools and insights, Zylo is critical for improving operational efficiency, reducing software costs, and eliminating license waste from your stack. In addition, it’s a chance to level-up the strategic importance of SAM within your organization and drive real business impact.
Explore the possibilities with Zylo for Software Asset Managers, or request a demo to see Zylo in action.
In the past 4 years, Adobe has rapidly scaled from $9B to $18B. This growth has made an already complex environment even more complex. Learn how they leveraged Zylo to get complete visibility into their SaaS portfolio, unlock millions in cost savings and avoidance and improve the employee experience.
See how the leader in cloud customer experience and contact center solutions reinforces software asset management and enterprise architecture with Zylo.
