If you’ve been following along, we don’t have to tell you again how much money is wasted on the IT category every year (about 1.5 Trillion), how much is wasted on SaaS and Cloud spend alone (about 500 Billion), and how much you are probably wasting (about 30%).

We’ve told you there are options out there to get SaaS spend under control (along with the other sacred cows), but they aren’t all equal. And understanding the differences is key to selecting the right solution … which is critical to extracting the value you expect.

In order to extract value from a SaaS optimization platform, you need to understand:

• how many solutions you really need
• how many users are actually using the solutions you do need
• whether they have the right licenses
• how much you should be paying for those licenses based on market averages
• … and so on!

If you’ve been following the stats, most organizations have three to five times as many app subscriptions as they should have. (Features ARE NOT Applications) The first key to savings is to get rid of the subscriptions you aren’t using at all as soon as you can. (And the second is to see how many of the applications that are being used can be harmonized so that some that are more or less duplicates of others can be eliminated over time.)

Then you need to figure out, of the applications that are being used, how many users are actually using them regularly — not just signing up for them when asked to do so or signing in once a quarter to get a report that they could be emailed. The next biggest way to save money is to minimize the licenses.

Then you need to figure out if you have the right licenses, especially if you are subscribing to module / application packages. If you’re subscribing to a suite, chances are not every user needs every module, even if it’s just a Microsoft office suite. Most users only use Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Teams … at most. Some won’t even use PowerPoint (if they don’t do presentations) and others, if they’re always in the office, will have no use for Teams. If you have hundreds of users with the full basic pack of 5 – 7 applications (because Microsoft loves to sell you on Visio and Project as well) and the majority only use 3, that’s a huge amount of money flowing down the drain.

But just getting rid of unused apps and optimizing licenses by employee isn’t enough, you still need to make sure you’re paying market rates, or you’ll still be paying a good 10% to 20% more than you should be.

None of this is easy.

• how do you know what apps aren’t being used when you never created an infrastructure to track utilization? and do so in a manner that’s not burdensome on your employees?
• how do you figure out if you can get rid of a license if it hasn’t been used in the past 30 days?
• how do you figure out what the right subscription is for each user when it depends on what they use, what they need to use, and a very convoluted set of package offerings from the vendor?
• how do you figure out what you should be paying when vendors do their best to convolute average market pricing to the greatest extent possible?

But SaaSRooms makes it easy by:

• offering a ShadowSense browser extension that tracks what apps your employees actually use without interfering with their work
• including automated integrated surveys which will automatically ask an employee if they are (still) using an application that hasn’t been used in the amount of time it should be used in if it is used on a regular basis (and, furthermore, the application can help you qualify license needs through role requirements, workflow demands, and usage patterns)
• providing a deep understanding of standard packages from some of the major vendors, including Microsoft (and can break it down no matter how convoluted the reps make the pricing tables out to be)
• drawing insight from deep data on market averages and know exactly what you should be spending

And then doing the analysis that needs to be done to identify the potential savings and, more importantly, when they can actually be realized.

But let’s back up to what SaaSRooms is and what truly makes it different and valuable. And to do that we’re going to go beyond the website marketing (because if they don’t say “AI” no executive will take them seriously, because the analyst firms are driving that hype train full steam ahead) and talk about what makes SaaSRooms different.

Fundamentally, SaaSRooms is a SaaS Spend Analysis platform, built by an ex-Simfoni founder specifically to do SaaS spend analysis to help organizations attack one of the most significant areas of overspend that traditional spend analysis systems couldn’t address. They do this by marrying AP, contract, employee and utilization data in a way that allows them to extract the deep insights they need to create a realistic savings plan you can actually realize.

That last point is worth diving into. They are more than just a platform, they are a managed service that works with you to develop a realistic plan that will deliver the savings you expect. (Their clients see anywhere from a 10% to 30% savings, and generally see a 10X ROI within two years, if not within a year. Moreover, the vast majority see a return within the first quarter after the first wave of opportunity has been addressed [including two clients who have permitted the publication of public case studies where they saved almost 300K in the first 90 days], and they are identifying an average of almost 6M in wasted SaaS and Cloud spend per client.)

Their ability to generate a realistic saving plan that you can accurately capture is one of the main differentiators. It’s easy to collect a stack of cost data across a hundred clients, compute market averages, compare that to AP data, and generate savings projections … but much harder to determine how much of those are actually realizable, and when. The reality is that if the contract has a year left, you just can’t cancel it. While many vendors will let you reassign licenses during a contract, most will not let you cancel it or reduce spending below a threshold (so you need to optimize it to the best of your ability until you can reduce spending or cancel the contract if you need to) — which means you need a staged plan that you can address in waves.

Since SaaSRooms collects, and connects, all of the relevant data, it can group the contracts into waves based upon when they can be (re)negotiated, along with giving you the insights to optimize them at the right time. (And, of course, based on these insights they can automatically mine and bubble up the insight at the right time and slot it into the right part of a multi-stage plan, and then they will create a step-by-step plan for you with verified opportunities based on the data).

The tool not only collects and connects all of this data, it centralizes it in a manner that is both easy to understand and to query in a manner you are comfortable. If you are a real analyst with real analytical (math) skills, you can drill through the data like you could in any other spend analysis tool. If you’re a business user who likes to chat with your applications, then you can use the GPT layer to ask questions and get the answers (and widgets) you are looking for. If you are an executive who just wants a summary of the plan, the built in AI layer will create an executive summary for you.

When you log in to the platform, you get the dashboard which summarizes the key SaaS metrics, the savings potential by stage and month, the current license utilization, pending renewals by month, compliance coverage, cyberthreat (if you have the cyber data integration), user anomolies, and summaries of your stack, from largest to smallest spend.

From here you can drill into one of they two main platform interfaces: Optimize and Manage.

Optimize is where you can drill into each app to evaluate and optimize the opportunity on an app by app basis. When you enter the Optimize interface, on the main Overview screen you see key metrics (app count, provisioned licenses, total spend, contracted %, users, and average utilization percentage). In addition, you see for each app the category (level 2), the amount being spent, number of licenses, number of active users, and inactive licenses. Drilling into an app on the App Summary screen you see all of the metrics on an app basis along with additional details on contract date, contract expiry date, payment method, key/managing user, spend breakdown by month, user count by month, logins by user, etc. You can also dive into renewals to date, pricing details, forecasted spend, etc.

Finally, you can dive into the savings plan summary, strategy overview, and opportunities. The application will summarize your total spend, addressable spend, and the overall opportunity. From here, you can drill into the savings forecast by quarter based upon the addressable spend in each quarter. From here you can drill into the quarterly summaries, broken down by application, and then drill into the individual opportunity which will give you all of the license and cost data and how much can be saved by reducing and optimizing licenses across actual users.

And, of course, you can quick-jump to the savings strategy report that summarizes the:

• current technology landscape
• optimization opportunities
• overlapping technologies
• cybersecurity contract optimization
• market-driven optimization optimization
• implementation roadmap

Moreover, because these reports can be generated by the embedded AI technology, they can be updated at any time by the client. This is critical because SaaS usage patterns will change, terms and conditions will change on renewal, cloud costs and compute requirements will evolve, and so on and the platform will automatically identify and revise your opportunities on an ongoing basis and this allows you to see overall trend adjustments at a high level at any time.

The end user organization has full control over opportunity management and can accept, modify, or reject all of the opportunities identified by SaaS Rooms as well as create their own from scratch if they so choose.

Plus, SaaSRooms also tracks cloud spend and utilization versus contracts and buckets and allows an organization to track, manage, and optimize their cloud spend as well as the platform will identify and detect:

• under-utilized instances
• abandoned instances
• instances ready for shutdown
• unattached (storage) volumes
• obsolete IPs
• obsolete images
• reserved instance opportunities
• obsolete snapshots
• abandoned buckets
• un-deallocated instances
• abandoned streams
• migration opportunities
• etc.

Once the optimizations have been selected, users can enter the Manage module where they can not only see the key metrics summarized at a glance, but dive into the

• backlog opportunities that are overdue to be addressed
• scoping projects in progress to evaluate the full extent of the opportunity that can be addressed
• negotiations in progress and the data that will help you achieve your goal
• contracting efforts in progress and where they are
• completed opportunities and savings realized

And, if the organization realizes that they have multiple applications that should be replaced by a single application, or is missing from their stack, in the Reach module they have their software marketplace where an organization can buy SaaS packages at pre-negotiated rates from the marketplace, where the rates are typically better than what a mid-sized organization can secure on its own (as with any software GPO marketplace).

And if the contract should be renewed, the built-in negotiation intelligence will help an organization secure better terms and pricing. Plus, the proactive contract management controls will ensure the buyers get early notification of upcoming renewals, up-to-date market rates, real-time insight into actual usage, and insight into negotiation strategies that are typically successful with the vendor.

When you put it all together, SaaSRooms is a great tool for

• Finance as they have complete visibility, can monitor projects, control approvals, and adjust budgets accordingly
• Procurement as they have a complete overview of current vendors, contracts, adjustment capabilities, renewal dates, identified, and captured savings (from rate and waste reductions)
• IT as it can track the entire SaaS stack used across the organization, manage users, and plan for utilization

as it can be fully utilized self serve but, as we indicated, also includes managed services to get the organization up and running quickly and identify the initial multi-stage savings plan (and ongoing guidance over time as desired).

Ooh, the way that you spend it
Makes me go crazy, show me you can end it
You could be saving more
Ooh, the way that you buy
Makes me go crazy, show you I can end it
You could be saving more

Much more
Much more
Much more

Get SaaSy, now, get SaaSy
Get SaaSy, now, get SaaSy
Get SaaSy, now, get SaaSy

Savings
Now (much more)

After all, it’s better these days if that New Thang is SaaSy!