Snow updates SaaS Management Platform to manage SaaS spend

ITAM News & Analysis

Snow updates SaaS Management Platform to manage SaaS spend

Snow SaaS Management gives IT leaders control of their SaaS portfolio with market-leading discovery, verified usage data and a complete, consolidated view of SaaS consumption

Snow Software has announced a new version of its Snow SaaS Management platform, while also making it available as a standalone product for the first time. Previously the product was only available as an add-on to Snow’s SAM solution.

Some of the main capabilities and benefits of Snow SaaS Management include:

• Optimize costs for expensive enterprise hybrid applications. Snow SaaS Management provides organizations with optimization for complex enterprise applications like Microsoft 365 or Adobe Creative Cloud. With hybrid applications, organizations need to understand online as well as installed usage to identify opportunities for downgrading from premium tiers to less expensive tiers.
• Immediate ROI with automated data normalization, augmentation and configuration of vendor portal API and SSO connectors. In addition to providing usage data for more than 23,000 SaaS applications, IT leaders can configure SaaS API connectors in minutes and immediately see areas for optimization within their organization such as licenses assigned versus licenses purchased.

In a nutshell, Snow states that it enables organisations to “take control of their sprawl, manage surprise SaaS costs, mitigate compliance and security risks, and optimize overall spend.”

Rising need for SaaS Management

According to a recent Snow survey, 44% of IT leaders cited ‘employees adding new SaaS applications without notifying IT’ as a top concern when managing SaaS applications within their organisation. As end-users have gained increased purchasing power, the proliferation of SaaS applications without the oversight of IT is causing blind spots for ITAM teams. As a result, SaaS cost, application sprawl and security risks can quickly spiral out of control.

“We believe that organizations need a SaaS management approach that eliminates the silos between users, departments and technologies that yields more insights into what applications are being used – and their overall impact,” said Sanjay Castelino, Chief Product and Customer Officer of Snow. “With our years of experience in SaaS management and rapidly expanding capabilities available on our Snow Atlas platform, Snow is uniquely positioned to deliver further value to organizations for decades to come. This is a significant moment for Snow as we broaden the reach of our SaaS management solution to the market, taking us another step toward achieving our larger vision of delivering Technology Intelligence to all organizations.”

Our analysis

Snow SaaS Management puts Snow firmly on the map in the SaaS Management Platform (SMP) category. The significant increase in optimizable applications is particularly welcome, as is the expanded suite of discovery and inventory methods.

Prior to this release Snow had focused on optimizing the applications most often used by enterprises, now they are able to optimize over 23,000 SaaS applications. Importantly, their agent technology enables fine-grained usage data to be gathered and this enables companies to trim waste from their SaaS budgets, budgets which are under increasing scrutiny. 

Snow’s decision to unbundle SaaS Manager from License Manager is also welcome. It enables them to compete directly with established SMP players and to bring their expertise to SaaS-first organizations which wouldn’t usually be customers for Snow’s “traditional” SAM and ITAM products. It’s great to see Snow back in startup mode, a way of operating which drove innovation in SAM a decade ago. Expect to see much more of this innovation as the product hits the market and evolves over the next year or so.  

Further reading on SaaS Management from the ITAM Review

• SaaS Management in Sustainable IT
• ITAM Review’s SaaS Management Maturity Assessment
• SaaS Management for large organisations requires a cultural shift
• Secrets to Managing your Cloud Costs in 2023 and Beyond: Podcast 128

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