VCs love SaaS. We love SaaS so much that we plowed $48.9B into the category in 2019 and $31.7B so far this year! The SaaS funding boom has fueled software revolutions in sales & marketing (Salesforce, Hubspot), video conferencing (heard of Zoom anyone?), HR (Workday, Gusto), collaboration (Slack, Teams), productivity (Office365, Asana) and even developer tools (Atlassian, JFrog). Everythingis a SaaS subscription nowadays!
On top of that, employees signing up for SaaS subscriptions on credit cards have further exacerbated things with the so-called “shadow IT” problem. The way organizations purchase software has fundamentally changed. In the old days, the CIO drove all IT spending in a centralized fashion and the value of that software usually accrued to the organization (e.g. ERP implementations like Netsuite, SAP, etc.). We now live in a world in which the buyers of software are focused on the value that accrues to themselves as individuals (e.g. productivity apps like Airtable, Notion, etc. that help you get your job done faster.).
All this has led to massive SaaS sprawl! 61% of IT executives say their organization is currently subscribing to more than 100 cloud-based tech tools. And how are they managing this mess? Wait for it…. Good ole’ spreadsheets!
Today we give a kiss goodbye to the SaaS spreadsheet. Productiv, a Norwest portfolio company, is announcing a free SaaS Management offering called Essentials. It’s a 360-degree view of all your SaaS applications and subscriptions. Essentials connects to your SSO system to gather all the details of your sanctioned subscriptions and also connects to your expense report systems to suck in all those shadow IT apps flying under the radar.
Now you can easily track all your SaaS renewals in one place instead of chasing down contracts and asking employees if they’re really using all of those licenses you purchased. For free!
The long game for Productiv is to provide enterprises, for the first time, a way to measure the productivity gains introduced by SaaS software (hence the company name!). Today, we are excited to help every company take the first step on this journey. Kiss that SaaS spreadsheet goodbye!
