Video Transcript
Tipalti provides financial automation applications such as accounts payable, purchasing, and also global payments, and our Tipalti virtual card.
My name is Terry LaRock, and I'm the Head of Procurement globally. Under procurement, we have purchased; we also have T&E (Travel and Expenses) and travel reports to me here at Tipalti.
Regarding our frustrations and understanding of our SaaS stack, we had to educate our employees on what SaaS means (Software as a Service). It was important. We wanted to understand how they were using it. Was it valid? Were we paying for it, or was it free? So, we looked for a SaaS discovery tool to provide that information.
"When we looked at five different SaaS discovery tools, we immediately chose Zluri to be one of the top two to contend with for the breadth of their integration, onboarding and offboarding, and ease of use."
We thought we had a couple of 100 applications. When we engaged Zluri, we felt we had a couple of 1000. It was well over 2500. So that was a surprise to us! It also helped us identify who was touching it and what employees were touching it. Then, we contacted those employees, asking how they were using this tool, as we were unaware of this.
"We integrated late last year (October, 2022) with Zluri, so we've been with them for over 6-8 months. We're very happy that we can identify over $100,000 in savings. But the key thing we saw was that we weren't overspending."
We were buying the licenses we needed for the applications we really wanted to work with. When the contract expires, we won't need to renew those applications that we no longer need.
The Zluri partnership starts from scratch, through phone calls and then video conferences. They welcomed us in—it was almost like we were already customers. They were very open and listened to our questions. Suppose there's something that they don't quite understand. They always said, “Hey, we'll get back to you,” and the response was quick.
"Working with the Zluri team has been fantastic."
In fact, I would like to call out Vijay, and he's been unbelievable. They need to clone him. He's fantastic and very supportive. We've actually established a Slack channel with Zluri to ask questions, bring up concerns, and say, "Hey, maybe I'm not looking at this right.” They're just so responsive, and they allow us to grow and use the Zluri application.
My advice when you are looking to have a SaaS discovery tool is to get multiple groups involved. It's not only an IT tool; it's a procurement tool; we use it to determine the number of licenses and how much we're spending. It is also an information security tool. They want to understand if any applications might have been in a data privacy or PII-type environment.
We also find that it is a legal tool because legal has access to see the contracts, “Are we utilizing the contracts properly?”. So, bring in all the different groups when you're looking at the tool. My recommendation is that you definitely put Zluri on the list!