SaaS Opportunities You’re Missing Because Your Visibility is Incomplete

You can’t manage what you can’t see. It’s that simple. Without a complete view of your SaaS portfolio, true SaaS management is impossible. As such, visibility via SaaS inventory management is the absolute bedrock of a successful SaaS strategy. 

Worse yet, there are numerous opportunities you’re missing without that visibility. That’s why it’s essential for IT, finance, and procurement leaders to have a complete view in order to build comprehensive SaaS strategies. What’s more, this visibility must go beyond application discovery, and grant visibility and granular insight into spend, contract and usage data to create actionable insights.

That’s why today we’re going to look at how the lack of full understanding of the SaaS portfolio impacts the enterprise. 

Opportunity #1: Understand and Manage Risk

Without a 100% accurate view of your SaaS, you can never be 100% certain that your tech stack is free of risks.

In an unmanaged SaaS environment, LOB leaders and employees alike purchase SaaS to meet their needs with little oversight. Though there are benefits to this purchasing, it comes with the drawback of shadow IT. Shadow IT are the applications that are operating in your tech stack without your knowledge. 

As such, this shadow IT poses a significant risk to security and compliance. That means it’s impossible for IT teams to properly vet these tools, and there’s also no way to know what data goes into these apps.

To mitigate these risks, you need that comprehensive visibility to know where shadow IT is lurking before you can even begin to address it. 

Opportunity #2: Reclaim Wasted Spend

Another lost opportunity from poor SaaS visibility is wasted spend. Without that visibility, you don’t know what is being spent where and why.

The proliferation of SaaS means that it is now often the highest source of expense right after headcount for a company. Unfortunately, much of that money is being wasted. The average organization without a system of SaaS management is only utilizing 49% of its SaaS licenses. Thankfully, there is good news.

That 51% of spend that goes to waste is ripe for optimization. 

100% visibility of your SaaS portfolio empowers you to address this underutilization. It also grants you insights into the most important optimization opportunities: rationalization and right-sizing.

Understanding your app usage across your entire organization allows you to reign in SaaS sprawl. This is where rationalization comes into play. Once you achieve visibility, consider where you might have redundant applications. After all, no company needs 20 project management programs.

In terms of right-sizing, knowing your app usage allows you to see what licenses are underutilized. You can take this information to your vendors and renegotiate for the appropriate number of seats for a single enterprise license. In the process, you maintain the utility of an application while optimizing it to suit your enterprise’s needs. 

Opportunity #3: Improve Renewal Management and Negotiation

Without 100% visibility on your portfolio, you lose the opportunity for effective SaaS renewal management as renewals inevitably slip by you. With organizations conducting about one renewal per business day, how can you prepare for renewals you don’t know are coming? With visibility, you can plan ahead to avoid gaps in service and even prepare to renegotiate your vendor agreements.

As renewals approach, you can decide what to do with an application. Much can change between renewals, and it’s best to take the opportunity to decide if it warrants a change in your SaaS portfolio. However, this takes time. Thankfully, by establishing 100% visibility of your portfolio, you can see all your renewals months in advance, allowing you to decide which applications to drop, downsize, consolidate, and more. 

Opportunity #4: Boost Employee Productivity

Without 100% visibility on your SaaS portfolio, you’re likely missing opportunities to partner with your stakeholders and expand the SaaS applications doing the most to help your employees do their jobs. These opportunities may be existing, underutilized applications that share functionality or even completely new applications. 

With poor visibility into your SaaS portfolio, not only are you missing out on this important SaaS information, but your employees can’t know what tools are available to them. 

As such, there are a number of SaaS opportunities to boost employee productivity you are missing with incomplete visibility. 

App Catalog

Creating an app catalog with pre-vetted applications ensures employees have the right jobs they need to do their job effectively. And at the same time, ensuring the proper security and compliance governance needed to protect the business. As such, you’re able to drive awareness of business tools, fast-track employee onboarding, and give users a clear line of communication in a one-stop shop for business applications. 

Sentiment of Applications

Visibility into SaaS usages allows you to start the conversation across your organization on what applications are being used. For instance, measuring employee satisfaction with the tools they have at their command. What’s more, you can use this to find SaaS opportunities for efficiencies in cloud applications across your organization and facilitate cross-department adoption of highly rated applications.

Plus, you’ll be able to monitor sentiment across categories to proactively address trends over time. 

Opportunity #5: Leverage Benchmarking

Without an absolute and true view of your SaaS apps, it’s impossible to get an accurate understanding of how your portfolio stacks up against your others. Using a robust benchmarking tool, like Zylo Benchmarks, allows you to compare your SaaS portfolio, sprawl, and spend. 

When it comes to spend, we find that companies on average overspend on SaaS by 15%. SaaS benchmarking will show you whether you’re getting a good deal on a specific tool, which gives you leverage during renewal negotiations.

Similarly, a benchmarking tool will also allow you to search the most popular SaaS applications by category and function. For example, if you realize an application just isn’t working for your sales team, you can use this tool to see what apps other companies are using that serve the same function.

Use Zylo’s Discovery Engine to Power Comprehensive Discovery

Complete discovery of your SaaS portfolio is what allows you to take advantage of all of these opportunities and more. Visibility is the first step in benchmarking, creating an app catalog, measuring employee sentiment, preparing for renewals, and eliminating wasted spend. After all, to solve a problem, you have to see the problem. Discovery is the power that allows you to see the problem.

With Zylo’s Discovery Engine you get a complete view of your SaaS portfolio. What’s more, it allows you to continually monitor your applications to make what’s a one-time project for some companies a continual program of improvement in your organization. The engine features patent-pending machine learning and AI model to discover 100% of your paid applications to support holistic SaaS management. 

Check out this datasheet today for more insight into how Zylo’s Discovery Engine powers the most comprehensive SaaS management platform on the market.