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SaaS usage insights to reduce SaaS spend

How to gain visibility into SaaS usage

You can’t control what you don’t see. To understand what you should be paying for, you need a SaaS management platform that allows you to understand how employees are actually using the resources you’ve purchased. Snow leverages multiple methods to capture SaaS usage for comprehensive visibility:

We then normalize and augment this data using our Data Intelligence Service – the world’s largest normalization database with over 750,000 software and SaaS applications. The result is a clean view of your environment that you can understand and use to make decisions.

Manage SaaS licenses

Once you have visibility into all the applications in use in your environment, you can begin to optimize your SaaS portfolio. A great place to start is with unused SaaS licenses. Snow marries detailed application usage information with entitlement data to reveal the percentage of subscriptions that are truly in use. We display that information in easy-to-use dashboards which allow you to immediately see where there are opportunities to save and increase SaaS ROI.

You can drill down into each application and each user to see individual activity. Thanks to our browser extension, you can see not only that someone logged into an app but also how long they used it – a critical element in determining the utility of that application for a particular user. Someone logging into an app twice over 90 days for 45 minutes each time, for example, is very different than two, 15-second logins over the same period.

Check out this video to see the solution in action.

“With Snow software asset management, we found we had around 450 people who did not make use of their Microsoft Office licenses, which alone could lead to a savings of up to a six-digit Euro figure.”  

– Ulf Kuetemeyer, Senior Manager of Contracting & Procurement, Panasonic Information Systems Company Europe

Gain the Upper Hand in SaaS Renewals

Armed with data on application usage, you can dramatically strengthen your position in a software renewal process. It’s all too common for organizations to renew licenses at the same quantity as the previous year. When you know exactly how many people in your organization are truly relying on an application to perform their jobs, you have an information advantage and are equipped to negotiate the best deal possible from your SaaS vendors.

Optimize SaaS License Type

Many SaaS applications have different subscription tiers, each with very different cost structures. Microsoft 365®, for example, has different tiers based on the components included and the delivery mechanism employed – cloud or local installation. Adobe Creative Cloud is available via a single app or all app subscription, which gives you access to all 20+ applications on the platform for a single fee.

Both examples are hybrid applications, and Snow’s unique combination of discovery methods gives you the data necessary to optimize each user’s license type:

  1. Our API connectors pull detailed information from the application’s portal
  2. Our browser extension then pulls information from the user’s browser to capture usage in the cloud
  3. Then, agent pulls information from the user’s machine to capture usage of installed applications. 

By combining all of this data, Snow shows you which applications are being used, which specific components are in use and how users are accessing each application. We provide recommendations for SaaS spend management by more appropriately matching users with tiers that suit their usage patterns.

In this short video, Snow Software Senior Solution Consultant Barry Siegel takes you step-by-step through the process of reducing Microsoft 365 spend and optimizing other hybrid applications.

To learn more, request a demo or start a free trial!