How to focus on SaaS optimisation
Software runs organisations. There is such a breadth and depth of applications, utilities and enablers. The sheer number of tools creates a colourful mix – a software kaleidoscope – that is far more complex the picture in this post. There is opportunity for tooling publishers to enhance their offerings through creative visual profiling.
This post follows up the CurioValue long read on “Smart Saas cities”. That article referenced various research that found ‘average’ counts of anywhere between 125 and 500 SaaS applications per organisation.
Understanding and optimising such complex SaaS estates requires it to be broken down. A multi-threaded campaign, with manageable chunks is probably best. That approach suits an agile, continuous improvement ethos as well. Here are some suggestions on how to tackle the SaaS landscape once you have some basic spend or usage data:
- Low cost per unit, but wide coverage products: validate the ubiquity of deployments. Focus on contract metrics and price per unit.
- High cost per unit products: profile the metric and measurement in detail. Seek data around adoption levels and regularity of feature usage. Determine redundancy that aligns to licensing models.
- High transaction volumes per vendor: Look at contracting models and volume purchasing.
- Platform / suite style products and vendors: Consider portfolio usage options in conjunction with product overlap. Negotiate bundled deals with protection from price gauging following lock-in.
- Perform functional overlap analysis with Enterprise Architecture and End User Compute teams. AI can help profiling, but should be combined with product lead engagement.
- A catch all is to offer an analysis of the major cost contributors to divisional / operating unit leaders. This works well one to two years after a solution is introduced, particularly so when there are different licensing levels or tiers.
There are pros and cons for all of these and the list is not exhaustive. One overarching principle is not to assume an initial economic assessment provides a valid case for change. It may do for the easy optimisation pickings, but the holistic cost to enact change needs to be well considered.
Talk to us at CurioValue to explore how you can increase the value from your investments in technology, especially SaaS applications.
