SaaS Spend Management: How Zluri Helps IT Leaders Deal with Budget Cuts?

SaaS adoption can affect the expenses of the organizations. An increase in costs can impact the overall ROI of businesses. IT leaders can control SaaS spending in business processes with a suitable solution.

Post-pandemic, the SaaS industry has grown due to the hybrid work model. This working environment has led to the growth of SaaS adoption, resulting in SaaS sprawl and disadvantages like shadow IT, lack of tracking SaaS licenses and their usage, etc. This increases unnecessary SaaS spending in the organization.

According to Gartner's report, end-user spending has reached $482 billion in 2022 and will exceed 45% by 2026.

​​The SaaS apps are easy to procure, install, use, and update. Therefore, creating effective SaaS adoption strategies for better workflow in business processes is crucial. Otherwise, it may need more applications to use to meet its full potential. A survey says that, on average, a company uses 254 SaaS apps, but the average app engagement over 60 days was 45%. This means that the remaining apps are not used or used less, which is increasing the SaaS spending.

Additionally, the CIOs can lay off resources under the pressure of an unstable business environment and reduce the business's expenses. But these decisions will impact the company later as it will cost time and money to streamline the workforce. So it is better to strategically manage the SaaS apps and their spending in the organization.

SaaS management can help organizations control the spending on SaaS applications. For managing SaaS apps efficiently, you can use a SaaS management platform. This will help you discover all the SaaS applications in the organization. In addition, the SMP will allow you to view SaaS renewal dates and vendor information, track and manage SaaS licenses and their usage, etc.

Let us now discuss how Zluri, a SaaS management platform, will help you manage and optimize your SaaS spending.

Use Zluri to Manage Your SaaS Spend Effectively

Here we will now mention how Zluri will help the IT leaders to manage the SaaS spend in the organization.

1. Zluri organizes and optimizes your SaaS apps

Zluri is a SaaS management software that helps IT leaders gain insight into the entire organization's SaaS stack under one platform. The platform allows users to manage SaaS spending and make effective cost-saving decisions to attain organizational goals. Moreover, it provides users with 750+ direct integrated applications and 2,25,000 applications in the SaaS library.

Zluri helps IT leaders to have an overview of the SaaS landscape in the organization. The platform can discover 100% accurate apps with the five discovery methods, i.e., SSO, finance & expense management, direct integrations through APIs, desktop agents (optional), and browser extensions (optional).

• Single sign-on:
  Zluri lets you connect to the software with a verified identity that allows users to trace the source of applications. Also, the IT leaders can identify which users are actively using the application, the departments they belong to, and more.

• Finance and Expense Management:
  With Zluri, you can identify the SaaS apps if the users have used their corporate or personal cards to make payments for these apps.

• Direct integration through APIs:
  The application directly connects with 750+ applications. The integration process makes the discovery of apps easy.

• Desktop agents (optional):
  With this, you can identify the applications installed in a system or device. It helps the user gain crucial data related to the apps.

• Browser extensions (optional):
  It gives you accurate reports of browser activities in the organization and identifies the applications, which you can analyze and make decisions accordingly.

With the help of Zluri's discovery methods, IT leaders can comprehend which applications are being used efficiently in the organization. This can eliminate the unwanted and duplicate apps for which you are paying, thus reducing the SaaS spending.

Instead of investing in redundant applications, the user can use the money to invest in more used tools for better productivity.

With Zluri, you can track the overall usage of the tools. For example, you can find out if the application is active, which vendor the application deals with, the departments handling the applications, and the original source of the application.

In the platform, you can view the costs of applications and make decisions for reducing the SaaS spend. Moreover, the user can manage the applications as per the needs of the business and eliminate unnecessary ones, which will help in SaaS spend management.

2. Monitors SaaS usage data and helps to remove unnecessary apps

Zluri provides the IT leader with usage monitoring data. In this usage data, the user can find out the active users of the application, average use of the apps, monthly spending, estimated cost, and more.

For example, your organization has purchased 1000 licenses for an application, out of which only 680 are only being used. This shows that 320 licenses are wasted. So, the IT team can rightsize the unused licenses and manage the spend on SaaS applications.

With Zluri, the users can identify each tool's feature usage and downgrade to suitable tiers. This will help you make the optimum use of the budget allocated in the organization.

Moreover, you can view duplicate apps with overlapping features and unused apps. Therefore, IT leaders can eliminate those redundant and duplicate apps. You can choose the apps that meet the business processes' requirements for better SaaS spend management and maximize productivity.

With Zluri, IT leaders can discover the source of cost leakage in the organization's SaaS landscape. The user can view all the department-wise spending and monitor which department is spending the most YTD.

For example- There are 2 departments: IT and procurement. The IT department has 6 users, and spending (YTD) is $53.61k. The procurement department has 76 users, and spending (YTD) is $36.43k. So we have noticed that even with fewer users, the IT department is spending more than the procurement department. The IT leader can easily find applications in the IT department with the help of Zluri and find out the gaps.

Further, Zluri provides spend reports that give you data on how to optimize spending across different app categories. These actionable insights help you systemize your applications and eliminate budget wastage. It traces your SaaS ecosystem, monitors, measures, and supports you to take control of your SaaS spending. Also, it improves your SaaS spend management decisions.

3. Gives an overview of the budget vs. actual SaaS spend

With Zluri, you can get insights into the budget allocated to different departments vs. how much they have spent. In case of budget overshoots, you can dig into the data to check what is happening and reach out to the app owners equipped with data.

You can also see which departments are consuming a large amount of budget. For example, we have seen many times that there is a budget wastage in app redundancies.

Moreover, it's common to find hidden charges at the end of the contract term while using the software. We help you find these overcharges, and you can see the difference between the cost mentioned in the contracts and the actual spend you are incurring.

4. Makes you proactive with auto-renewals

Most of the SaaS apps have auto-renewals. Employees who sign up for any SaaS app can forget to cancel their subscriptions. This leads to paying for unnecessary apps which are not being used anymore.

For instance, an organization's marketing team purchased Asana for a new project. The team completed the project in eight months and stopped using the project management app. Unfortunately, the marketing team forgets to cancel the subscription. This led to auto-renewal every month for an unused application.

With Zluri's Renewal Calendar, you can keep track of upcoming renewals. This helps you to track the various contract renewals and alert you way before the renewal date.

The alerts vary for payments and contracts. For payments, you can get 7 days and one-day alerts before the payment date. Whereas for contracts, you can receive 30 days, 15 days, and one-day alerts in advance. These alerts will help you to prepare for negotiations for the apps to continue or discontinue the unused apps.

Zuri's renewal insights will help you to make strategic decisions on upcoming renewals. Further, support you in optimizing your SaaS spending.

In addition, you can set custom alerts for renewals to prioritize high-value contracts. This will help you to get all the renewals of high-value contracts; otherwise, it can be a massive loss for the organization. These contracts are crucial for the organization, and Zluri helps you to be proactive with auto-renewals.

How Zluri Helped MoEngage Save Over $250k - Case study

MoEngage is a customer engagement platform that enables companies to create, execute, and optimize their digital marketing campaigns. It offers a set of products, from predictive analytics to campaigns for personalized targeting and cross-channel customer engagement.

In the last few years, MoEngage has developed significantly in the employee base, leading to the signing or onboarding of multiple software spread across various teams and stakeholders. Also, their finance department found it challenging to manage the last-minute renewals of the SaaS apps since it gave them very little space to negotiate with the respective vendors.

Additionally, MoEngage's different departments carried out the procurement of apps independently. As a result, it led to unused and underutilized software applications and unplanned SaaS buying and renewals, causing software wastage and overspending.

With Zluri, MoEngage consolidated its complete SaaS landscape on a single dashboard with all the expenses, usage, and users of each application. Zluri's renewal calendar starts giving alerts 60 days before the renewal is due. It gave ample time to make decisions on renewals. By doing so, Zluri was able to show a saving of $250,000 within six months of MoEngage's onboarding.