SaaS apps give your teams the tools they need, when they need them – but all those apps are difficult to keep track of, let alone manage. In this blog, we look at 5 key ways that effective SaaS management can help you bring order to SaaS chaos, helping you optimize spending, consolidate apps across teams for procurement economies of scale, automate time-consuming manual processes, elevate the strategic role of IT, and more.
The availability of thousands of apps ‘as a service’ means that employees can quickly access the software tools they need to work smarter, and to maximize their productivity. But with software procurement moving inexorably outside of the centralized IT department, SaaS management challenges are growing, and fast. After all, as the old adage goes, you can’t manage what you don’t measure – and where SaaS apps are concerned, you have little hope of measuring what you don’t even have visibility over. How can you be sure, for example, exactly which software tools marketing is using to support their campaigns, or how many different project management apps are being used across the business? How do you know if the SaaS tools your lines of business are buying really meet their needs? Or whether SaaS licenses are being utilized, or renewed unnecessarily at a high cost to the lines of business? The good news is that you can finally get some answers to these challenging questions with the latest generation of SaaS management solutions.
The top 5 benefits of effective SaaS management
By deploying effective SaaS management tools, and engaging with lines of business on SaaS needs and usage, you can achieve a number of important operational and cost-optimization benefits. These include:
- Visibility of all apps in use across the business
including ‘approved’ SaaS apps, unsanctioned business apps, and ‘personal-use’ apps that have no role in supporting business activities. This visibility provides a solid foundation for initiatives to streamline the application portfolio, right-size licensing based on user requirements, and for ensuring that only safe and approved apps are being used by teams. - Optimization of SaaS spending
based on the ability to identify and remove underused licenses, and to consolidate licenses across multiple teams who are paying for the same tools. The leading SaaS management tools also help you engage with users to gauge the utilization and ‘usefulness’ of specific apps, and to avoid poor-value renewals. - Reduced operating costs
with the ability to replace time-consuming manual processes, such as employee onboarding and offboarding, with automated and auditable workflows. This saves time for both the IT team and for lines of business, allowing teams to focus on more value-added activities. - Consolidation of apps to increase productivity and management efficiency
based on the ability to identify when different departments and teams are using different apps for the same tasks. This often happens with project management applications, where it’s common to see several, very similar tools in use across different teams in the business (think Monday.com, Airtable, Smartsheet, Clickup). As well as reducing procurement economies of scale and increasing complexity of user training and support, this fragmentation makes it harder for teams to collaborate on projects that touch different parts of the business. With the right SaaS management tools, you can discover where apps can be consolidated across teams to lower licensing costs, simplify operations and support, and make inter-team collaboration simple. - Improved data protection
based on greater visibility of users granting third-party access to company data or resources such as Google Drive folders or even their email accounts.
Optimize your SaaS management capabilities with Trelica
Trelica’s SaaS management solution helps companies of all types and sizes achieve the full range of operational and cost-optimization benefits.
By providing clear visibility of all your SaaS apps and their usage, our solutions help you negotiate more effectively with vendors when procuring and renewing key enterprise apps; extract full value from your SaaS investments by addressing unused or unallocated licenses; and consolidate apps across departments and teams to increase collaboration, productivity, and licensing economies of scale.
Trelica can also help you tackle ‘shadow IT’ by giving you the tools to discover and analyze unapproved software in use. As discussed in our previous blogs, ‘shadow IT’ isn’t always a helpful term. It’s a slightly negative catch-all for what’s usually a very diverse set of apps – from undeniably risky personal-use apps, through to legitimately useful business tools that could be delivering real value to your organization. Managing the SaaS apps you discover requires insight to these subtleties, plus a range of tools to support the best possible response in any given situation.
Engaging users to understand which apps they want and need
As well as giving you the complete picture of SaaS apps in use, Trelica helps you engage with users to better understand their reliance on unsanctioned SaaS apps that – if formally adopted – could enrich your IT capabilities and inform your planning. After all, your end users are like an ‘expert field team’ with hands-on experience of working with an array of SaaS apps. By talking to them, and – crucially – by listening to them, you can play a key role in optimizing the range of software tools available.
By combining a nuanced, engagement-based approach with more traditional IT tools for user monitoring, Trelica helps to drive real improvements in productivity, team collaboration, and end-user satisfaction. IT teams are embracing this approach to elevate their role from ‘service provider’ to expert advisors on all things SaaS, cementing their strategic role in tech decision making across the business.
We’ve put together this video to show you how Trelica can deliver each of the 5 SaaS management benefits we’ve outlined above – a 2 min demo for each of the benefits. If you like what you see, let’s find a time to talk.
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