Procurement

  • 5 min read

Why You Should Outsource Your SaaS Buying

Sethu Meenakshisundaram

28th September, 2022

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Outsourcing SaaS buying can help you save a lot of time and effort. You will reduce a lot of the burden on your procurement team. Also, there is no need to divert your existing resources toward SaaS procurement and renewals. 

SaaS procurement can take a lot of time and isn’t an easy job to be done. It requires expertise in evaluating SaaS products for their usage, security, and compliance and negotiating price and terms (SaaS agreements). 

Even if you have the expertise for software procurement, keep in mind that buying SaaS is very different from buying software for an on-premise world. Buying SaaS hugely depends on employee experience. Without a way to measure employee SaaS usage, your entire efforts can go in vain. 

Now, the important question is, why not manage SaaS procurements by yourselves rather than outsourcing the same to a third party?

This is true that managing SaaS procurement could be done in-house, but it’s going to take in-depth knowledge, investment, and research–and it can be very time-consuming. 

There are hundreds of SaaS apps in the same category, with all making similar claims. It is confusing to know which one is better for your requirements, and evaluating the same can be challenging. 

In contrast, SaaS buying experts have large databases of app resellers and have expertise in negotiation. They can easily help you with which app will be right for your use case. 

Outsourcing SaaS procurement can help you solve four major ways:

1. Saves your time

2. Better terms

3. Save costs

4. Better fulfillment of requirements

In this article, we will talk about the benefits of outsourcing your SaaS buying.

Benefits of Outsourcing SaaS Buying

Negotiation is an art. When you are dealing with the SaaS provider directly, it is challenging to get the best deal without having insights into SaaS usage. Especially when you are a large company with multiple SaaS products with a huge number of licenses required. 

You might be doing it less frequently and might not have a clear understanding of the right SaaS products, their billing terms, and other terms in the IT contacts, etc. 

1. Better Agreements Terms 

The terms of the agreement vary for the number of licenses purchased. You may require 500 licenses, but a SaaS buying service provider deals hundreds of thousands of licenses with the vendors. As they procure applications for multiple companies, they leverage the consolidated buying power of all their clients. So vendors give them flexibility on different terms in the agreement. 

For example, 

• Better support terms (accessibility via phone rather than just email and chat

• Support requests can be solved on a priority

• Billing frequency of choice: monthly/quarterly/annual billing 

• No auto-renewals

• Low/no fines for late payments up to a certain period

• Cap of price increment or price lock for future, etc.)

• No cap over usage or usage-based pricing based on your requirements

Further, you may be assigned to a dedicated account executive and support in implementation.

2. Finding the Right SaaS Solutions

Finding the right SaaS stack is very challenging. You have to thoroughly understand the requirements of your organization, the pros, and cons of different applications, and what value and problems an application brings. Currently, IT teams don't have a way to evaluate if the solutions are right. 

Most IT teams use traditional methods like employee surveys for this job. But the problem with this method is not only that they are inefficient, but there are chances of inaccuracy. There is no way to verify if the responses in the survey are correct.

Without data, you can't present your case to management for more budget. 

Moreover, it leads to the growth of shadow IT issues. When the employees' needs are not met, they sign up and use apps of their liking rather than those procured by IT teams. This adds up to security and compliance issues, which then become a burden for IT teams.

As a result, every department uses different SaaS solutions and loses track of expenses and the number of SaaS solutions used by the departments and the employees. Few departments try to manage it through an excel sheet.

3. Security and Compliance

There are three concerns related to the security and compliance of SaaS apps while purchasing and during usage:

• Not knowing the security and compliance posture of the SaaS provider. Compliance certifications are a way for SaaS providers to show they are serious about their customers, vendors, employees, etc data. It shows that the company has security measures to protect its sensitive data.

• Not knowing how much data is shared with SaaS apps. Since these apps hold a lot of company-sensitive data, it is important to have visibility into the data shared in these apps.

• Not knowing the attack surface due to shadow IT. Since employees can sign up for any apps without the awareness of the IT department, these shadow apps can provide an entry point to malicious vectors to the company data. The more the number of apps, the bigger the attack surface would be.

A SaaS buying expert, like Zluri, doesn't just help you with one-time benefits like lower costs of licenses but provides you continuous benefits like SaaS governance, thus, helping eliminate shadow IT.

4. Reduce your Time and Money Spent

Outsourcing SaaS buying can save you huge time. Managing renewals and purchasing hundreds of SaaS apps is overwhelming for most IT and procurement teams today. 

Taking the help of SaaS buying experts frees up a lot of your time. Outsourcing your SaaS buying can make things much faster, better, and more cost-effective. 

• Time spent in building procurement team

• Time to learn and room for making errors

• Time to evaluate and negotiate with different vendors

• Time to implement: Having gone through the process multiple times and knowing the obstacles in implementation, SaaS buying can also help you maneuver around these hurdles.

Buy SaaS with Zluri at Zero Risk

Zluri is a SaaS management company that aims to accelerate the world’s transition to SaaS. We encourage companies of all sizes to fast-track innovation and derive real value from their SaaS buying. We believe in simplifying the world of these companies and helping to achieve their goals smoothly. 

Outsourcing your SaaS buying to Zluri will benefit you and your company in many ways like saving time, reducing cost, and saving in building a separate procurement team for SaaS products. It will help you to manage multiple SaaS products on a single platform. 

Referring to a case study, Zluri helped a top cyber security company save $500k and 400 hours on SaaS procurement. 

For MoEngange, we saved over $250k in 5 months.

We at Zluri have a team of specialists in SaaS products and deal with multiple SaaS companies. Our team understands and analyzes your company requirements and accordingly works on them. 

Once we understand the requirements and build the list of tools you require, we first find suitable vendors for those tools. We find the right vendor and give them the best deal for the required tools. 

Beyond the simple cost benefits, Zluri can also experience significant company growth, quick development, and scalability. Outsourcing ensures none of the factors have been ignored, as we take care of all the aspects that a company needs.

SaaS buying is not an easy job, and there are far more important and strategic things that you could be spending time with. Why not outsource SaaS buying to Zluri? Outsourcing SaaS buying to us will help you procure the best SaaS apps.

Some companies maintain multiple spreadsheets to manage their SaaS products. But many issues are bound to occur, like manual updates, time-consuming work, less accuracy, costly affairs, etc. 

A SaaS management tool like Zluri will help you with all your SaaS needs, from buying to getting the most out of your operations with no risk and zero upfront costs. We can reduce any duplication of SaaS apps and also minimize the number of SaaS products, which results in securing your company data.

Zluri knows the SaaS marketplace and can help you get the best SaaS stack for your business in your allocated budget. We help you save by planning your SaaS buying and with data-backed negotiations and help you save up to 50% on subscriptions cost. 

When working with Zluri, we also established governance around all contracts and payments within a period of 12 to 18 months.

About the author

Sethu Meenakshisundaram

Sethu is the Co-founder of Zluri. He believes SaaS and APIs will help everyone become a builder. He frequently writes on SaaS management and workplace automation. Before Zluri, he was part of the founding team at KNOLSKAPE, one of the leading corporate learning gamification startups that he helped scale across 30 countries. Other than technology, Sethu is passionate about quizzing, board games, and photography. His retirement plan is to operate a board game bistro in one of the touristy spots of Southeast Asia.