Article Eliminates Shadow IT, Optimizes SaaS Stack & Spend

Customer Profile 

Article is a direct-to-consumer furniture and decor company that provides customers with modern, stylish, and well-priced goods straight to their doors. With over 850  employees, it has shipped more than 1.5 million orders to customers in the U.S. and Canada since its launch in 2013.   

Challenges 

Article’s lean IT team found themselves struggling with the manual nature of SaaS management. Their process entailed updating a  spreadsheet with detailed info sourced from a variety of dashboards, and constantly communicating with stakeholders to keep track of applications and licenses. 

Utilizing a spreadsheet as their source of truth was inefficient and inaccurate. Salar Sahraeian, Senior Manager of IT at Article, said, “As soon as we updated it, it was out of date. We had no real visibility into spend or into what applications we had as a company. There was a lot of waste.” 

This was especially apparent during critical operations such as offboarding employees. Sahraeian called it a “best-guess scenario” in which they’d go one by one into applications they believed a former employee had accessed to deprovision them. 

Unfortunately, there was no way to ensure they had covered the employee’s full tech stack. This created significant wasted spend, as licenses often sat unused once employees departed. 

David Capling, Systems Administrator at Article, said, “There was no opportunity to consolidate our license count. We had this extensive, labor-intensive spreadsheet and could still only track a small portion of licenses.” 

He added, “SaaS was ballooning out of control. We had to start controlling our spend and find places to save money.”

Why Article Chose Torii 

The IT team compared Torii and two other SaaS Management Platforms using a point scale that graded on a variety of features, usability, and use cases. All four of the team members scored Torii higher than its competitors.

In Capling’s words, “Torii ranked much better from both ease of use and well-roundedness of the total platform. It was quick and easy to integrate. We knew it would help IT tremendously, while also helping other teams like Finance.” 

They leveraged Torii’s extensive discovery capabilities, including its browser extension, and immediately found almost 400 more apps than they had been tracking. Sahraeian said, “We saw value from Torii right away and within 2-3 months we realized our ROI.” 

Using Torii, they could see every single application in use at their organization, as well as real-time usage and spend information on every license and user, and compare Article’s full SaaS stack to target redundancies — all within a centralized platform. 

According to Sahraeian, Article also uses Torii as a tools documentation center.

“If anyone from the CEO and CFO to business team managers wants to find out anything about any tool, they can see in Torii what it does, the billing contact, how we pay, chargebacks to departments, who the users are, whether it’s an active contract, and more. Torii is a key source of SaaS truth for us.”

How Torii Helps 

Eliminated Shadow IT 

With full visibility into every application, Article successfully combats Shadow IT. Previously, while they partially tracked some sanctioned applications manually, they had no visibility into unsanctioned ones. 

That totally changed with Torii. Capling said, “We went from tracking 65 apps to knowing that we had more than 450. Torii showed us the scale of what was going on behind the scenes.” 

This unlocked immediate opportunities, as not only was Article able to get an accurate picture of their full SaaS stack, but they were also able to use this information to create governance policies for curbing unsanctioned app adoption. 

The IT team wished they had Torii sooner. Sahraeian said, “I recommend getting Torii early on in your SaaS journey because as you grow, it’s going to become more difficult to manage apps.” 

Capling added, “Torii’s an excellent proactive tool. If you can get buy-in early, do it as it saves so much work and headaches. There was a lot of savings potential that we didn’t know about.” 

Cut costs through optimizing apps and licenses 

Within the first few months, Article saved over $100,000 by just leveraging the visibility enabled by Torii. Sahraeian said, “Once we were able to see every app and how they were used, we could optimize, consolidate, and eliminate tools we no longer needed and licenses that weren’t used effectively.” 

Article leverages Torii’s dashboards and real-time usage data to target underutilized apps, reclaim licenses, and recycle them. They use Torii’s app comparison feature to review the usage and costs of apps that have similar functionality in order to eliminate app redundancies.

The team created workflows for offboarding, so when an employee leaves Article, IT is able to cease access to all their applications and reclaim licenses. They also plan to use Torii’s workflow engine to automatically detect when a license is not used frequently, mark that user as inactive, and reach out to reclaim that license. Additional workflow plans include departmental-based license provisioning, further offboarding optimization, onboarding, and more.  

Article also integrated Torii with Netsuite, enabling Torii to serve as a central location for app costs across their full stack. They also use Torii’s benchmarking feature to see how their spend on specific apps compares to that of similar companies. All of this helps them better manage their IT budget. Sahraeian said, “Now I can forecast spend for the next year, collaborate with Finance, and align our budget with company objectives.” 

Effective Governance 

According to Sahraeian, “Having such great visibility into how apps were used helped us figure out the best policies for app adoption and slowed the amount of Shadow IT flowing in.” 

Now, before anyone attempts to subscribe to an application on their own, they contact the IT team. Sahraeian explained, “Employees now come to us first. We then either offer them a solution that’s already in use or, if they need a new tool, help them get it for the right price.”