Enterprise SaaS Management Market gains momentum

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Enterprise SaaS Management Market gains momentum

It’s been a busy few weeks in the Enterprise SaaS Management space. Read on for a roundup of investment announcements, acquisitions, and new entrants. We firmly believe that 2021 will be a year of rapid growth for SaaS Management tools and services, as customers seek to get to grips with the increase in SaaS spending in 2020.

Torii receive new funding

SaaS Management startup Torii has raised $10m in “Series A” funding. This is an important milestone for Torii, who we’ve been tracking since 2018, and who participated in our SaaS Management Market Report in 2020. Of the SaaS Management startups it means they’re the 3^rd best-funded after Zylo & Cleanshelf. Funding at this stage of their growth is vital and I would expect them to kick on in the same way that Zylo & Cleanshelf did after completing funding rounds in the last 18 months. I expect them to use this funding to build out product development teams and to build market awareness. I’ve been impressed by their solution because it has been built from day one with the aim of taking a broad platform approach to SaaS Management, but also feel they’ve not built awareness or momentum as quickly as some other solutions. This funding should help them change that.

SailPoint acquire Intello

For startups, acquisition by a larger company is often the way to deliver on their goals, and that’s the case with Intello, who we’ve been tracking since 2018. Identity, Access, and Security provider SailPoint have acquired them, which is a particularly good fit as a key use case for SaaS Management is meeting requirements for secure onboarding, offboarding, and data security/privacy. This follows hot on the heels of Cleanshelf announcing integration with Okta last month – Okta compete with SailPoint in many markets. Intello join VendorHawk (ServiceNow), MetaSaaS (Flexera), and Alpin (Coreview) in being acquired.

Apptio acquire SaaSLicense

One more acquisition to report – and one that slipped under the radar towards the end of last year. Apptio have acquired SaaSLicense – a very early stage startup who also participated in our Market Report in 2020. Apptio were, before this acquisition, primarily a cloud cost management company, focused on managing public cloud IaaS estates. This acquisition fills a hole in their offering, enabling them to offer customers a complete solution to managing cloud costs and risks, both in the datacentre and on the desktop.

What does this all mean for the Enterprise SaaS Management market?

2021 will be the year that the importance of SaaS Management comes to the attention of senior leadership teams in IT & Finance. The rapid shift to remote working in 2020 has resulted in 15%+ growth in SaaS spending, and much of that will have been unplanned. With SaaS contracts typically running for 12 months leaders will see unexpected expenses hit in Q2/Q3, and SaaS Management tools are a big part of the solution to that governance and budgeting issue.

New startups and approaches

We’re now 4 years into the SaaS Management wave and yet we’re still just getting started, as evidenced by new startups continuing to enter the market. New entrants include Lucidum who approach SaaS Management through a risk management lens, meeting use cases typically of interest to CISOs as well as ITAM Managers. They combine raw inventory & discovery data with machine learning to provide visibility of blind spots and enable cost management, risk management, and compliance goals to be met. Meanwhile, Zluri, a SaaS Management startup from India, has also just secured seed funding. Whilst their technology stack is similar to major players in this market they also see the need for services, including contract negotiation & vendor management as a service in some plans. This approach is something we’re seeing from just outside the core SaaS Management space from providers such as Vendr and Cledara. Clearly, there is an ecosystem building around SaaS Management and we’ll be expanding our coverage to take account of this.

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