Companies today rely on hundreds of SaaS applications to conduct daily work and drive their business forward. But many have no idea of the skyrocketing number of cloud apps in their ecosystem – or the negative impact those apps can have on costs, productivity and security.
That’s because IT and procurement teams no longer control or have insight into who uses what apps. In today’s workplace, employees often know better than anyone which apps are best for their jobs – and they’re likely to subscribe to and adopt new apps themselves without informing IT or procurement.
With employees adding cloud apps at unprecedented rates, and continual changes in apps, users, usage, and costs, it’s impossible for IT to effectively manage the full SaaS lifecycle, which includes everything from adoption, onboarding, and offboarding users, to license management, renewals, and application rationalization. Unless, they collaborate with other SaaS stakeholders to optimize the process, that is. IT needs to work with employees who now “own” the apps they subscribed to, and players in procurement, security, and finance, to take part in managing this new distributed SaaS reality.
Related: What is Distributed SaaS Management?
All stakeholders must be empowered with the right data, insights, automation, and actions to cut spend, boost efficiencies, and do more with less. Torii’s newest advances make it easier than ever to drive the speed, collaboration, and transparency needed for end-to-end Distributed SaaS Management:
- Empower app owners as co-managers
- Delegate and automate virtually any task
- Take actions to reduce costs using Torii’s recommendations, benchmark, and chargeback features
Empower App Owners to Manage SaaS
Torii’s new App Owner feature raises the bar for SaaS management by making it easy for people who own apps to manage them. IT teams can assign app owners with real-time visibility into their specific app’s users, usage, license utilization, expenses, and cost-saving opportunities. Equally important, app owners can take actions regarding users (onboarding and offboarding) and licenses (reclaiming, changing tiers, reharvesting), as well as uploading, editing, and archiving contracts, from within Torii.
Combined with Torii’s existing procurement, IT admin, and IT owner roles, the app owner feature sets a new standard in SaaS management best practices, enabling a truly collaborative, empowered team.
At 360Learning, the people who purchase or are the primary power user for an app are responsible it. Before Torii, everyone managed their apps their own way using their own methods. Information was siloed and there was no way to get a complete picture. Torii changed that by giving us a distributed platform that our 70 or so app owners can use to manage everything about their apps, contracts, and users in a unified way. It’s easy to identify and add app owners to Torii, and for them to use the platform. And with all this critical SaaS data in a central location, it’s also simple for key stakeholders, such as finance and operations teams, to quickly access the data they need to drive our business forward. Torii’s app owner feature makes it much easier for us to collaborate on SaaS management and saves a lot of time.”
– Valentin Kiselak, Sr HRIS manager, 360Learning
Drive Collaboration and Accountability
Ticketing management and delegation
Using Torii’s automated capabilities and relying on rich Torii data, you can create tickets or tasks in popular collaboration platforms for various scenarios:
- App security reviews
- Renewal preparation
- Employee offboarding
- And more, all while enriching these with all data needed for efficient task execution.
Deep integration with tools such as Jira, ServiceNow, Freshservice, Asana, and Monday allows IT admins to easily assign SaaS management tasks to stakeholders through an organizational task management platform. This creates visibility for all stakeholders and makes the tasks easy to monitor.
With Jira, for instance, IT can delegate offboarding tasks by automatically opening Jira tickets and have complete visibility over the tasks’ progress. Torii monitors the Jira issues created and automatically marks users as offboarded based on ticket status updates. This reduces IT’s burden while providing the transparency and accountability they need to oversee SaaS management effectively.
Delegate offboarding issues via Jira:
Flexible app catalog
Your employees can see which applications are sanctioned within your organization and request access in a process you define, thereby reducing Shadow IT. Torii’s newest capability gives you the flexibility to create custom automation for individual app access requests, for example, choosing to automatically provide access, sending a survey to determine why an employee wants access or contacting the employee’s manager upon access request via Slack or email.
Advanced Data Engine
Torii ingests scattered and unorganized data from all of your applications. It then automatically unifies and standardizes that data into personalization tokens. These tokens serve as no-code “building blocks” for complex automation. With those building blocks, you can:
- Create hyper custom workflows for your unique use case
- Develop nuanced and personalized communication at scale
- Derive better, faster insights for other stakeholders to increase the rate of collaboration
With the Advanced Data Engine, everyone will base decisions from a single source of truth.
Enhance Cost Optimization: Torii pays for itself, and more
Gartner says organizations that don’t centralize visibility and manage SaaS life cycles will “overspend on SaaS by at least 25% due to incorrect and unnecessary entitlements and not rationalizing overlapping tools and instances.”
Torii customers routinely save hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars with distributed license management, app rationalization, and renewal management – enabling Torii to quickly pay for itself and continue to deliver significant ongoing savings, and help you meet your budget goals.
– Joel Burgess, Head of IT Operations, Smallpdf
New capabilities and insights that make this even easier for IT, procurement, finance and app owners include:
Cost-saving license recommendations
For many apps – such as Salesforce, Zoom, Calendy, Asana, Zendesk, Monday, Lastpass, and more – Torii’s cost-saving license recommendations enable you to save big. Torii identifies opportunities, suggests and enables you to take actions, and reveals the savings impact. Based on feature-level usage, Torii surfaces recommendations on downgrading specific licenses that aren’t fully utilized and/or reclaiming and reharvesting past user licenses with a touch of a button.
License cost benchmarks
With license cost benchmarks; you can compare the price you are paying per license to prices similar companies pay, using anonymized market data. This can be particularly useful at renewal time, as you can use this information to negotiate better terms with vendors and achieve significant savings.
Chargebacks (Showbacks)
Chargebacks are valuable for companies that hold departments accountable for their technology usage and resource expenses. They bring visibility to exactly which departments are driving which app costs for budgeting and forecasting.
Different types of strategies are used for different apps and license types. Torii enables you to use:
- Bottom up – cost per license when different costs apply to different license types.
- Bottom up – cost per user when you pay per user regardless of their license type.
- Top down for apps that are not charged per seat (e.g. Cloud Computing, Firewalls, Network Infrastructure), where you allocate cost to business units by percentage.
What’s Next?
Torii is continually adding new innovations to our Distributed SaaS Management platform based on customer input and market needs and opportunities.
To hear what we’re up to, bookmark our blog and check out our LinkedIn and Twitter posts.
Check out our demo to see Torii in action.
