Managing Saas Part 3 — Financial Optimization Tools
Edit: Managing SaaS Part 1 — with links to all other parts.
As you may recall from our giant infographic, SaaS management offers a large number of financial optimization tools. For the right person, it’s amazing and thrilling:
Why Does Continuous SaaS Cost Optimization Matter?
Shadow IT now comprises 40–50% of IT spend, and there’s a good chance no one’s paying sufficient attention to it.
In other words, there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit in SaaS.
Interested in cutting SaaS costs? We can do a 10-minute demo and you’ll see how Alpin can work for you. Get started by emailing info@alpin.io.
How Does Alpin Optimize Financials?
Alpin manages and right-sizes your SaaS application financials in many ways, based on the scope and nature of the discovery we conduct.
We help optimize SaaS financials through:
• Directly reducing costs
• Enforcing license compliance
• Monitoring renewals
(BTW, compare this to others who say they are discovering Shadow IT, but look only at your financial systems. That only gets 10% or 20%…)
Details On Cutting SaaS Costs
Directly Reducing Costs
Some cost-cutting actions can happen quickly, and others develop over time.
Does an application have excess licenses, inactive users, or users who really don’t need that expensive premium-level subscription? Find those and cut them quickly.
After you discover multiple departments are using an app, you could consolidate under one contract to reduce per-license costs. And maybe another department uses a similar app, but it’s more expensive. De-dupe the apps, and get them on the new enterprise agreement.
Going through a financial audit? Use Alpin to quickly analyze the situation, report on costs by product category and forecast future spending.
Enforcing License Compliance
When (not if, but when) a vendor launches an audit to check for license compliance, you can avoid some unnecessary costs. Why? You’ll have already quickly audited yourself.
For example, you may notice that your entire marketing department has one license with the marketing@example.com email. Yet other departments have multiple licenses. That may be your cue to eliminate a multi-user account that violates license terms.
Another department could have subscriptions to an app, but they’re using the freemium version. However, your license agreement may prohibit freemium subscriptions and apply significant penalties if they are found. Let Alpin find those vulnerabilities before the vendor charges you costs plus penalties.
Manage Renewals
What if you had a calendar of renewals for every SaaS application? You can. Not only that but get alerted to upcoming renewals.
Why does this matter? You’ll be prepared for any negotiation with both the timing and user information in hand. And you can eliminate any over-provisioning by time of renewal. That’s leverage.
Plus, you can prevent bad auto-renewals and preserve good contracts.
Want to cut SaaS costs? Join us for a 10-minute demo, and you’ll see how Alpin can work for you. Get started by emailing info@alpin.io.
Interested in discovering what’s inside your cloud app ecosystem? We can do a 10-minute demo and you’ll see how Alpin can work for you. Get started by emailing info@alpin.io.
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