Blog

  • SaaS Tracking Template: Keep Track of Your SaaS Apps

    If you are having difficulty managing your SaaS apps, this SaaS tracker template will save you time and help you keep track of spending on these apps. This template will also help you plan for upcoming renewal and record license details.

  • A Framework to Eliminate SaaS Wastage

    ‘Muda’ is used to describe any activity that uses resources but doesn't generate value. It is the Toyota system for identifying and eliminating waste in all forms. It is the same thing that helps Toyota sell more cars than Ford, General Motors, and Honda at a higher margin.

  • SaaS Management: 3 Key Challenges

    With this explosion of SaaS at companies, there is a risk of these apps getting out of your control as they bring three critical challenges with them.These challenges varies in three dimension: spend management, security and complance risks, and various SaaS operations tasks like automating SaaS procurments, renewals, employees onboarding and offboarding.

  • Zluri Updates (March Edition): Notes, App Type, Merging & Mapping

    We have introduced ‘notes’ to keep track of your tasks, ‘Application Type’ feature to sort your SaaS stack from other applications; ’Application mapping’ to identify missing apps; and also, ‘Application Merging’ feature to cut down costs due to plugins from the same parent application.

  • Best 30+ SaaS Management Platforms to Discover, Manage & Secure SaaS Apps [2021]

    SaaS management platforms can vary in their use-case, functionality, and costs. In this list, you’ll find the best 30+ apps to help you narrow down your search.

  • Everything you need to know about the cloud marketplace before you step in

    Initially, the cloud market just consisted of third-party apps. Now they have evolved bigger as a sophisticated distribution platform that offers its users the functionality to explore, procure, and deploy relevant SaaS applications at present.

  • Announcing our seed funding

    In our endeavor to bring Zluri to life and build a sustainable organization, we have raised USD 2M from Endiya Partners and Kalaari Capital as seed funding. We are excited to have Sateesh Andra and Vani Kola on our board to help us along the way.

  • Let’s talk about SaaS security and why you must be proactive

    Undoubtedly, Software as a service (SaaS) has changed how the global workforce operates

  • Do you know your SaaS stack?

    The question ‘Do you know your SaaS stack’ might sound pretty elementary at first glance.

  • Subscription-based Software (SaaS) is the Panacea for Almost Anything

    It does not matter what the challenges with building a company are; software is (almost) always the solution.  At the start of September 2020, I set out to build Zluri with 2 of my co-founders. Every time we encountered a problem statement, there was always a SaaS solution to help solve our problem. Felt like someone in the world thought ahead of us all the time. Their work helped speed ours. The best part? To use those SaaS tools, we did not have to shell out a fortune. The low cost made us favor the buy decision in the 'build vs. buy' argument.  In less than ten weeks of company formation, we see ourselves using more than 28 software subscriptions, and we have only five employees, including three co-founders, and our product is not released yet! Employee: Subscription Software ratio is now almost 1:6. I will be tracking how this ratio skews in the months to come as we expand the number of employees and customers. Before sharing the software stack that we have deployed or about to deploy, I want to share how we make software buying decisions in the current boot-strapped stage of zluri.com,   Software that follows the freemium model based on either employee size or API calls or the number of active users is our first choice. It helps us spend $ only when we scale.  Software that is part of the start-up ecosystem and offers a time-based, revenue-based, or funding-based discount is our second choice.  Software that follows a 14-day or a 30-day trial-based approach is our third choice.  Software that does not allow any trial but wants us to pay just after a demo to use it is not a choice unless we have used the software in the past, and buying decision is a no-brainer.  From org stack to tech stack, the details are here.  Organization Stack Communication - Slack (Freemium) Email Suite - GSuite (Previously used) Expense Management - Zoho (Freemium) Video conferencing for calls under 40 minutes - Zoom (Free tier) Marketing and Growth Stack  Inbound Marketing – Hubspot (Start-up plan)  B2B Database – ZoomInfo (Previously used)  Prospect and Talent Reach out - LinkedIn Sales Navigator (Previously used)  Keyword overview and SEO – SemRush (Previously used)  Website Analytics – Google Analytics (Free) Adwords – Google Adwords (Pay per use)  Content Management System – Netlify (Freemium) Content Correction – Grammarly (Previously used) Customer conversation – Intercom (Start-up plan) HR Stack  ATS and HRMS - Freshteams (Freemium) Centralized Document Management - Revv (Freemium) ESOP Management - Lets Venture (Freemium) Healthcare for Employees - Plum (Start-up plan) Employee On-boarding – Trello (Freemium) Product Management Stack  Product Management – ProductBoard (Free trial) Task Management – Asana (Freemium) Tech Stack  Project Management – Airtable (Freemium) Appointment Scheduling – Calendly (Freemium) Authentication – Auth0 (Start-up plan) Database – MongoDB (Freemium)  API – Postman (Previously used) Tool building – Retool (Freemium + Start-up plan) Application Monitoring – Sentry (Freemium)  Email notification – Sparkpost (Previously used)  Code review – Github (Freemium plan) At the current stage of our growth (or should I say the inception stage?), we set up these software apps. This is not even including the sales stack, customer success stack, and the billing stack that by itself will have 15+ SaaS apps at the minimum. I can already foresee the number of software that we will be using in the next six months to one year and all the hassles that come with managing so many software on my emails and slack!  But I got to agree on one thing. If we had not taken this approach of moving to SaaS for our product building and company building, we would have conservatively taken thrice the time to reach where we have got now. In sum, software-first thinking to problem-solving has been empowering to us as an early-stage company, and I can only imagine how world-changing it could be for companies more prominent than ours.

  • 20 Best Books to Accelerate Your Digital Transformation

    Today, the adoption of digital transformation is imperative for every business to survive and thrive in a highly competitive marketplace. Business benefits of digital transformation include higher enterprise-wide productivity and efficiency, enhanced user experience, in-depth and accurate insights, faster and better business decisions, and improved agility and innovation, resulting in increased business revenue and sustainability. We have got the 20 best books that can help you accelerate your digital transformation journey. Let's dive right in. 20 Best Books for Digital Transformation Adoption and Acceleration 1. Digital Transformation Playbook: Rethink Your Business for the Digital Age by David L. Rogers 2. Digital Transformation: Survive and Thrive in an Era of Mass Extinction by Thomas M. Siebel 3. Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery by Sriram Narayan 4. The Technology Fallacy: How People Are the Real Key to Digital Transformation by Gerald C. Kane, Anh Nguyen Phillips, Jonathan Copulsky, Garth Andrus, Paul Michelman (Editor) 5. Building the Agile Business Through Digital Transformation: How to Lead Digital Transformation in Your Workplace by Neil Perkin (Goodreads Author), Peter Abraham (Goodreads Author) (Co-author) 6. Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy Is Delivery by Andrew Greenway, Ben Terrett, Mike Bracken, Tom Loosemore 7. AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee 8. Clearing the Digital BLUR: How Organizations Can Transform Themselves At the Speed of Digital by Rajiv Jayaraman 9. Platform Scale: How an emerging business model helps startups build large empires with minimum investment by Sangeet Paul Choudary 10. Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy--and How to Make Them Work for You by Geoffrey G. Parker, Marshall W. Van Alstyne, Sangeet Paul Choudary 11. Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy by Alex Moazed, Nicholas L. Johnson 12. Edge: Value-Driven Digital Transformation by Jim Highsmith, Linda Luu, David Robinson 13. IT Strategy: A 3-Dimensional Framework to Plan Your Digital Transformation and Deliver Value to Your Enterprise by Jim Maholic 14. 77 Building Blocks of Digital Transformation: The Digital Capability Model by Jace An 15. Mastering Digital Business: How powerful combinations of disruptive technologies are enabling the next wave of digital transformation by Nicholas D. Evans 16. The Digital Matrix: New Rules for Business Transformation Through Technology by Venkat Venkatraman 17. Agile Transformation: Structures, Processes, and Mindsets for the Digital Age by Neil Perkin 18. The Transformation Files: 17 Insights to Inspire Managers and Leaders in the Transformation of a Digital Economy Business by Rob Llewellyn 19. The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler 20. The Industries of the Future by Alec J. Ross Conclusion 1.     Digital Transformation Playbook: Rethink Your Business for the Digital Age by David L. Rogers Rogers explores digital transformation phenomena and what distinguishes organizations that successfully adapt and thrive in the digital world. With a decade of experience in global business consulting and teaching at Columbia Business School, Rogers explains how established companies can refresh their game plans to capture new opportunities in the digital world. Pick this book for: The book focuses on practical tools and strategies for all businesses, big and small, across all industries, useful in decision making and strategy formulation. It contains case studies for a detailed illustration of concepts. The Digital Transformation Playbook is an indispensable guide for executives that explains how legacy businesses can transform to thrive in the digital era. Goodreads Rating: 4.15/5 (522 ratings) 2.     Digital Transformation: Survive and Thrive in an Era of Mass Extinction by Thomas M. Siebel In his book, Tom Siebel provides much-needed clarity on digital transformation. The book talks about the convergence of four significant technology forces – big data, cloud computing, Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things, and how they have revolutionized businesses in private and public sectors. In his book, Tom illustrates the real-life digital transformation case studies at Caterpillar, 3M, U.S. Air Force, and Royal Dutch Shell and explains how top executives in an enterprise can successfully drive digital transformation. Pick this book for: Besides helping his readers understand digital transformation, Tom offers actionable advice and concrete guidance for a successful digital transformation adoption. Goodreads Rating: 4.04/5 (300 ratings) 3.     Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery by Sriram Narayan In the book, Sriram Narayan explores organizational design by IT leadership for IT organizations. He leverages his industry experience, existing literature on organizational design, and well-regarded work on a team and individual psychology to synthesize an Agile IT organizational design that could benefit the enterprise IT. The book is a framework and standards agnostic and discusses problems, explores reasons, and provides solutions. The book is for top-level executives and IT governance group members for medium to large IT organizations that face business and IT agility challenges.  Pick this book for: Sriram has used real-life examples to help you evaluate and enhance enterprise designs to improve mastery, autonomy, and purpose. Goodreads Rating: 4.07/5 (153 ratings) 4.     The Technology Fallacy: How People Are the Real Key to Digital Transformation by Gerald C. Kane, Anh Nguyen Phillips, Jonathan Copulsky, Garth Andrus, Paul Michelman (Editor) The book explains why an organization should focus more on processes and people than on technology to respond to digital disruption. The authors leverage their four years of research in partnership with MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte, interviews with managers in organizations, including Google, Walmart, Salesforce, and surveying 16,000+ people. They argue that businesses can successfully respond to digital disruption by changing the organizational culture to be more risk-tolerant, agile, and experimental. Pick this book for: The book guides business leaders and managers to survive digital disruptions by making organizational changes to harness technology’s power. Goodreads Rating: 4.17/5 (137 ratings) 5.     Building the Agile Business Through Digital Transformation: How to Lead Digital Transformation in Your Workplace by Neil Perkin (Goodreads Author), Peter Abraham (Goodreads Author) (Co-author) The book guides the change managers and enterprise development professionals to understand, implement, and learn the workplace digital transformation. By setting aside the outdated strategies and traditional thinking, the book focuses on creating enterprise velocity, removing unnecessary processes, establishing iterative working, mapping strategy to motivation, embed innovation, and developing talent to succeed. Pick this book for: The book efficiently delivers information to audiences of varied experiences and levels. It offers real-world case studies coupled with practical advice with more technical and academic knowledge and serves as an essential guide to building an agile organization. Goodreads Rating: 4.32/5 (56 ratings) 6.     Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy Is Delivery by Andrew Greenway, Ben Terrett, Mike Bracken, Tom Loosemore ‘Digital Transformation at Scale’ guides the readers on how to build a digital institution. It explains how reformers in governments and businesses have globally enabled their enterprises' pivot to this noble way of working, with the lessons learned from their experience. Pick this book for: The authors leverage their experience in designing and delivering the UK government's successful ‘Government Digital Service' (GDS), the new institution responsible for the digital transformation of government, creating public services for the internet era. Besides snipping GBP4 billion off the government's technology bill, GDS opened up public sector contracts to thousands of new suppliers and became tremendously popular among citizens with its superior-quality online services without a big marketing campaign. Private sector companies and other countries notified the GDS model’s success, and it's now being copied across the world. Goodreads Rating: 4.27/5 (81 ratings) 7.     AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee In ‘AI Superpowers,’ Dr. Kai-Fu Lee reveals that China has rapidly caught up with the US at an astonishing speed. According to Lee, Chinese and American AI will significantly impact white-collar jobs besides having a devastating effect on the blue-collared jobs as predicted by most experts. Lee claims that these unprecedented AI developments lead to dramatic changes much sooner than expected.  Pick this book for: He further explains the jobs that will be affected and those that can be enhanced with AI and discusses how we can offer solutions to some of the most significant changes in human history. Goodreads Rating: 4.16/5 (8,422 ratings) 8.     Clearing the Digital BLUR: How Organizations Can Transform Themselves At the Speed of Digital by Rajiv Jayaraman The new breed of competitors like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Alibaba are disrupting the industries using innovative strategies beyond the understanding of most seasoned enterprises. The book helps you understand how these digital-born enterprises perceive the world around them. Besides helping you transform your organization to compete in today's digital rat-race, the book explains how to thrive in the digital age. Pick this book for: Tackling the digital challenge calls for a fresh perspective compared to the industrial age management playbooks. ‘Clearing the digital BLUR’ serves as a guidebook for managers and leaders to accelerate digital adoption, backed by a modern strategy, leadership, execution, and culture. It offers a holistic approach to digital transformation through practical insights in actionable frameworks, case studies, worksheets, and leaders’ interviews. Goodreads Rating: 4.33/5 (12 ratings) 9.     Platform Scale: How an emerging business model helps startups build large empires with minimum investment by Sangeet Paul Choudary Contrary to selling a product or service, today’s massive scaling startups build a platform for others to create and exchange value. Some of the examples are social media, the Internet of Things, cryptocurrency, and more. Yet, most platform ideas fail due to a lack of proper understanding of the business design and growth strategies. Pick this book for: Platform Scale not only writes down a structured approach to designing and scaling a platform business model, but it also addresses the key aspects that can succeed or fail businesses through six core concepts. Goodreads Rating: 4.23/5 (415 ratings) 10.  Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy--and How to Make Them Work for You by Geoffrey G. Parker, Marshall W. Van Alstyne, Sangeet Paul Choudary Fact-based, authoritative, ‘Platform Revolution’ is the first of its kind of “owner’s manual” for successfully creating a platform business model. It explains various ways for newbies to identify prime markets and monetize the network. It reveals strategies behind the upcoming business platforms to current business leaders and explains how traditional organizations can adapt to the change. Pick this book for: Besides discussing regulation, security, and consumer trust and examining markets that may be mature for a platform revolution, the book explains the bright prospect of platforms. It shows how they will change the careers and lives of millions forever. Goodreads Rating: 4.13/5 (2,845 ratings) 11.  Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy by Alex Moazed, Nicholas L. Johnson Platforms like Google, Amazon, Snapchat are game-changers. Rather than making things, these platforms create value by connecting people and dominating everyone’s daily lives worldwide. Mobile computing has transformed how we interact and blend the physical and digital worlds. While these enterprises are expanding their influence from the digital world to the entire economy, just a few individuals genuinely grasp this radical structural shift. Pick this book for: In ‘Modern Monopoly,’ the authors explain what has changed, how it affects today’s organizations, and how business owners, entrepreneurs, and managers can adapt and succeed in the new era. Goodreads Rating: 4.08/5 (585 ratings) 12.  Edge: Value-Driven Digital Transformation by Jim Highsmith, Linda Luu, David Robinson In ‘Edge,’ the authors talk about the fast, adaptive, value-driven, iterative, lightweight, and powerful new operating model that helps achieve continuous innovation by closing the gap between digital strategy and execution. ‘Edge’ addresses three critical aspects, i.e., working together among the criticality of vital and rapid responses, allocation and tracking business investment funds for their goal and vision-based initiatives, and ways of rapid adaptation to thrive Agile. Pick this book for: The book delivers practical insights leveraging its authors’ unparalleled experience and pioneering clients. Goodreads Rating: 4.38/5 (42 ratings) 13.  IT Strategy: A 3-Dimensional Framework to Plan Your Digital Transformation and Deliver Value to Your Enterprise by Jim Maholic With over a dozen IT executives and CIOs’ interviews, the book lays out the process from a blank whiteboard to an all-inclusive IT Strategy. ‘IT Strategy’ illustrates a range of technical and non-technical topics to facilitate readers to devise a road map to their desired future state and repeatedly emphasize the alignment of IT Strategic Planning with central business key performance measures and strategic business planning. Pick this book for: With 25+ years of IT Strategist stint, Jim Maholic has consulted with many reputed and largest enterprises in North and South America. He leverages his expertise to deliver a notably thorough and consistently precise guide in ‘IT Strategy.’ Goodreads Rating: 4.86/5 (7 ratings) 14.  77 Building Blocks of Digital Transformation by Jace An ’77 Building Blocks of Digital Transformation’ is a practical field book that explains the proven digital capabilities as the fundamental digital transformation blocks. It discusses the approach to assessing and enhancing digital capabilities for achieving successful digital transformation and is ideal for digital practitioners such as IT professionals, sales reps, marketers, digital planners, and digital consultants. The book consists of 12 mega capabilities (set of capabilities) and 77 capabilities. Pick this book for: The book serves as a ready-made yet highly customizable solution for those organizations that find it challenging to establish a robust and agile framework for their digital operations. Goodreads Rating: 4.83/5 (6 ratings) 15.  Mastering Digital Business: How powerful combinations of disruptive technologies are enabling the next wave of digital transformation by Nicholas D. Evans ‘Mastering Digital Business’ serves as a strategic guide for IT and business executives. Today, mobile, cloud, intelligent automation, IoT, social, analytics, wearables, and robotics are some of the most disruptive technologies. Pick this book for: The author talks about how we can leverage these technology combinations and mastery in digital services, platform business models, and leading practices in corporate innovation to create and execute our digital strategies for competitive advantage. Goodreads Rating: 4.21/5 (14 ratings) 16.  The Digital Matrix: New Rules for Business Transformation Through Technology by Venkat Venkatraman The book helps its readers understand the types of players forming the new business landscape, the transformations that every business will experience, and the winning moves to ensure your organization’s success.  Pick this book for: It helps you learn to navigate the digital ecosystem world, discover how you can compete and collaborate with other organizations for creating and capturing value, realize how robust machines can maximize your organization’s human talent, and learn to assemble the team to experiment with new ideas, reassess your core beliefs, and reinvent your business strategy for the digital future. It explains how to rethink your business model, assemble the right team, and make bold strategic choices to harness digital technology. Goodreads Rating: 4.21/5 (14 ratings) 17.  Agile Transformation: Structures, Processes, and Mindsets for the Digital Age by Neil Perkin ‘Agile Transformation’ offers practical advice and covers everything, including the need for new operating models, ways to apply agile principles at scale, how to leverage digital-native processes, and why change managers should think big but start small.  Pick this book for: It discusses tackling the staff mindset that can hinder agile adoption, create and engage high-performing teams for change, and why a plan of starting an agile business need not fail. Featuring case studies from organizations including Amazon, Netflix, and Vodafone, this book is vital for businesses to compete in the new world of work effectively. Goodreads Rating: 4.5/5 (12 ratings) 18.  The Transformation Files: 17 Insights to Inspire Managers and Leaders in the Transformation of a Digital Economy Business by Rob Llewellyn ‘The Transformation Files’ is a collection of critical success factors that every leader should focus on during digital transformation adoption. Rob leverages his two decades of experience in 30+ countries to help some globally renowned firms generate commercial value from people. Pick this book for: This knowledgeable and easy to read book is backed by relevant work experience and offers practicality to start applying the guidelines and insights immediately. Goodreads Rating: 4.33/5 (6 ratings) 19.  The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler ‘The Future is Faster than You think’ investigates the impact of rapid technology acceleration on both our society and daily life. The book offers a prescient look at our impending future. Pick this book for: The book explores the convergence of digital technologies and their revolutionizing impact on today's legacy industries and their impact on our daily activities such as governing our nation, raising kids, or caring for our planet. Goodreads Rating: 4.33/5 (6 ratings) 20.  The Industries of the Future by Alec J. Ross In the book, Ross distills his observations on the forces that are changing the world. Backed by nearly a million miles of travel to forty-one countries as Hillary Clinton's Senior Advisor for Innovation, Ross emphasizes the best opportunities for progress and discusses how countries thrive or sputter. Pick this book for: The book explains the ways we will need to adapt. Ross offers a vivid and informed perspective on how sweeping global trends affect how we live in today and the future. Ross examines the particular fields that will form our economic future over the next decade, including the impact of digital technology, robotics, the commercialization of genomics, artificial intelligence, and cybercrime. Goodreads Rating: 4.04/5 (6,868 ratings) Conclusion The above books discuss how digital transformation has affected practically every industry and every aspect of a business. They provide multifaceted solutions that offer insights on innovation and agility, helping companies achieve increased revenue and much-needed sustainability in today’s competitive marketplace. Do you have more book recommendations to add? Feel free to drop in a message and we will review it.

  • A plugin to boost your productivity on Google Meet

    Remote work has been the norm for some time now and productivity tools have been on steroids for a while. Last month our team logged in 7 hours per day on an average over google meet. That’s a whole lot of time. Also, data from Techcrunch shows that Google Meet is one of the most downloaded app during these times

  • Understanding 'Shadow IT' and its Risks – Quick Intro

    Shadow IT is essentially any software or hardware that runs without IT knowing about it. These can be

  • Why Zluri? Why now?

    Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse. - Sophocles

  • Top 5 Personal Subscriptions Management Apps [April 2021] + How to Choose

    The subscription business model is booming. Previously dominated by newspapers, magazines, gyms, utilities, and telecommunications firms, more products and services are being offered to more people through subscriptions than ever before

  • The Case for Building a SaaS Management Tool Ground Up

    In the early part of my career (circa 2010), I had the privilege of working with some of the large Fortune 500 enterprises. During those days, the cloud wasn’t still too mainstream (Market Size - 5.56 Billion USD), and we were all fascinated looking at the data centers managed and maintained by my employer.

  • The Story of Forgotten Subscriptions & the Birth of Zluri

    One Saturday evening, I got an email notification that I was charged $80 for an Adobe Creative cloud subscription. I was beyond confused—I could not recollect when I had purchased it.