How to Earn an Easy Win with SaaS Management 

Christine Morris

Good morning — or afternoon, depending on where you are. Welcome.

This is our ninth MasterClass for ITAM, and today we're going to focus on how to earn an easy win with SaaS management. We're going to do some quick intros, talk about the state of SaaS, talk about how you manage SaaS with ServiceNow, SAM entitlements, and how SaaS fits into your ITAM strategy.

And we'll save a little time at the end for some Q&A.

A little bit about Ondaro. We are the only pure-play ServiceNow partner with fully certified resources across every product within the platform — everything from ITAM to App Engine. And we do that through these three key pillars. Envision — these are where we're supporting clients that are interested in business transformation. We do a lot of organizational change management.

AI readiness has become a big thing with everyone starting to get entitlements. From an Implement and Develop perspective, we do platform architecture and engineering, our standard product implementations. We've got an award-winning UI/UX design team, application development, and in addition to that, we have an arm of the business that supports steady state for our clients — things like platform operations, enhancement services, and product management.

I am Christine Morris. I am Vice President of Consulting. I've been in the ServiceNow ecosystem — it seems like forever — but since about 2015. I was a platform owner for about the first half of that and loved the platform so much that I changed my entire career. And I'll let my friend Ian introduce himself.

Ian Cahall

Thanks, Christine. Hi, Ian Cahall. I am the Associate Director and Principal Architect for Ondaro's ITX practice. I've got responsibility for our ITAM space, but also ITSM and Security and Risk. I've been working in and around ServiceNow for over a decade now, and over the last several years I've really focused in on the IT asset space — it's one of the areas where I'm spending the most time.

Looking forward to speaking with everyone today.

Christine Morris

A little housekeeping. If you've been with us for a while, you know we have many MasterClass series. If you're interested in catching up, we have about ten episodes for CMDB and all of those are available online, plus a host of others we've done from an ITAM perspective. And in addition, we've got a new MasterClass that we're doing — Platform Owners. If you look in the chat, there'll be a link if you're interested in checking those out.

And if you've been with us for a while, you know we love our audience polls. Let's kick this off.

We'll ask you to reply with your letter in the chat. Are you able to prove and justify your IT Asset Management ROI on the platform? A: yes, the ITAM module shows the real value of the platform. B: it's difficult sometimes, but the organization understands the importance of it. C: not really, but I'm trying. D: I don't know where to start to prove the investment was worth it.

We'd love for you to respond in the chat. We'll go ahead and move on.

Ian Cahall

I'll go ahead and take over here. We're going to start by discussing the current state of SaaS. In order to do that, we want to start by talking about what SaaS is. We're taking a 101 approach to this session just to make sure we're all speaking the same language, and that as we work through the actual content of today's session, these elements are well understood. Because very often we find ourselves barreling into a topic, and we want to make sure you really understand what it is we're talking about.

This category — SaaS — is software as a service. As I'm sure everybody has seen over the last five to ten years, it seems like everything has become "as a service." In addition to software as a service, there are devices as a service offerings out there, and AI as a service is obviously becoming a new thing.

There are a lot of different versions and elements of what that looks like, but specifically for software, what we're really looking at are subscription-based, remote-hosted — and more specifically cloud-hosted — applications that are being used both by businesses and individuals. For our purposes, we're going to be really focused on the business side of this.

One of the things that makes SaaS differ a little from other types of assets is that it doesn't live on our hardware — it doesn't live on our laptops, tablets, or mobile phones. Measuring usage can be challenging. It's not as easy to say, "we saw that you opened Microsoft Office on your computer," because in this case it doesn't quite work like that.

And one of the things to remember is that not all SaaS publishers operate the same way. Even though most of them are going to be web-based browser UIs where we're accessing via login, there are others that are more hybrid. Great examples are going to be some of the more common ones like Microsoft or Adobe, where you have the ability to sign in to Microsoft 365 online, but you've also got applications installed on your device.

In those cases, we experience even more difficulty trying to wrap our heads around the best means of managing these things and how to quickly do so. This sets the stage for where we go from here in trying to understand why this is important to our businesses.

This is something we try to highlight every time we're talking about SaaS, especially from the perspective of trying to secure an easy win for your ITAM teams or your organization at large. Gartner put out a threshold a handful of years ago that has been proven repeatedly since then — organizations that are not doing any kind of real software asset management today, or maybe living in spreadsheets, have the ability to cut their spending on software by as much as 30%. We've seen this actually play out across a number of our customers, sometimes in excess of 30%.

It's really important to conceptualize that as we're talking about how we actually achieve this within ServiceNow. Keep that in the back of your mind and start thinking about — if you have any line of sight to what your organization is spending on software today — what 30% of that could do for your organization if you were able to reallocate it to other things.

So why does this happen? Why do we run into scenarios where that 30% is on the table? Why are we potentially spending money on applications we don't need, or on subscriptions that people aren't using?

We run into this for a number of key reasons. Number one, we've got fragmented visibility. If you're operating in a world today where you're working in spreadsheets or relying on SaaS publisher consoles like the Microsoft 365 admin console or similar toolsets, you are required to take the same steps multiple times over in multiple different places. Generally speaking, you've got to learn to look for different things in those different places.

That not only requires time and energy, but also a refined skill set to effectively manage those things across these separate systems. The reality is that most organizations respond to that by saying, "we're not going to do that for everything." We're going to focus maybe on specific publishers, or maybe we're not going to do it at all because it's not worth the squeeze. We're here to tell you that it is — but the way we get there is much more efficient if we apply some practice and program to it.

The other thing is that within our organizations, each product tends to be owned by different groups. Many organizations will say our Microsoft 365 is owned by this team, our Adobe is owned by this team, and our Salesforce is owned by this team. Even where it is consolidated, there might be different individuals within those groups holding that responsibility. And because of that fragmentation, we also tend to lose sight of product overlap.

Where one team may be using Microsoft Project, another team might be using Monday or Miro or any number of other tools that achieve similar outcomes. In some cases that becomes duplicated spend. In other cases, if we consolidated the licensing or subscriptions from all those different toolsets, we might actually qualify for volume discounts from a single consolidated publisher.

There are a lot of different reasons why we want to get better visibility across all of our SaaS products and how we're actually spending on them. In addition to that, there are challenges with the actual subscription models. Different SaaS publishers align their products to different models for how they measure actual usage — sometimes on a per-user basis, sometimes on a per-device basis. Layering that into our fragmented visibility makes the difference between tools and how things get measured incredibly complex to manage unassisted.

And in these cases, opportunities for savings on overages or volume discounts are not necessarily going to be made clear on invoices, because once one of these vendors has you locked in to purchasing a product, they're generally not incentivized to show you opportunities to reduce your costs — unless you start to threaten to cancel. These are the sorts of scenarios we want to be more proactive about. We don't want to be waiting until that last minute to see what options are on the table.

When we are doing those things, we don't want to do it in a manual fashion. In many cases, if we can automate actions like reclamations or distribution of software, or identifying when our entitlements are up and when we want to take action on those things — all of that helps us better stay on top of and capture those opportunities for savings in more real time. We would rather have that savings dollar accounted for upfront today rather than six months, a year, or two years in the future, because all of those are opportunities to reallocate those dollars to other projects within our organization or improve our performance.

For those of you that have joined us before, and those joining for the first time, I want to quickly touch on what ITAM is and how SaaS licenses play a role in this process. Our previous sessions have covered a wide range of topics — from hardware asset management to base software asset management and SAM Pro, Enterprise Asset Management, and more. SaaS licenses fall right within this, and specifically under our software asset management program.

As we finish out this session, you'll see that the SaaS license management opportunity is a great way to step into software asset management without taking on all of the commitment and sometimes some of the upfront costs of standing up a software asset management tool in its entirety.

One of the things we really try to look at as we figure our way through this is a set of key questions. Do we know what our annual SaaS spend is? How many different publishers are we working with? What are their subscription terms or models?

Is it possible for us to save money or consolidate subscriptions? Do we have agreements that allow for that, or do we think those opportunities exist? And more importantly, for the subscriptions we are paying for — who isn't using them in a way that makes sense for the investment?

If we're spending $1,000 on a Microsoft 365 subscription, at what point do we say that someone's usage isn't enough to justify that cost? Is it someone who only uses it once a month? Once every two months? Once a year? At what point does the value not match the expense we're putting out to make that subscription available? In doing these things, we're able to set our thresholds for how to successfully manage this going forward.

Christine Morris

I'm going to look for you guys to respond in the chat for this poll. Do you know how many SaaS subscriptions your company has in total? A: yes, I know the exact total and we keep the info well organized. B: I know the total for a few departments — somewhat organized. C: I know what my department uses, but I have no idea about the others. And then my personal favorite — D: does my Netflix count?

Shannon says C — she knows what her department uses but has no idea about the others. And Zoe — I love it — does her Netflix subscription count? Brandon says C. That's a pretty common response. Christine with another C. Dante with another C. And I think that's kind of the point of this, right — you really want to get to a point where you understand your entire software infrastructure.

Ian Cahall

On average we're seeing C. As we get into our next section and talk about how we actually do this within SAM — as we jump back in and talk about how we actually do this with ServiceNow SAM Pro and SAM Advanced — one of the things we're going to talk about is exactly how we formulate what this looks like within ServiceNow. But after we walk through what the process of actually managing these licenses within SAM looks like, we're going to follow that up with a segment where we talk about how we build our strategy around this.

One of those things we really want to keep in the back of our mind is what is our scope, what is our goal when it comes to managing SaaS applications or SaaS licenses? Because for each organization that could look a little bit different. Sometimes it's very much departmental. Sometimes you operate in a more federated model and need to understand what other divisions of the business are doing. And certainly for many of our customers who operate in a more centralized fashion, as you establish that software asset management team and core, their responsibilities will grow over time in terms of the number of publishers and products under management. It's a good backdrop to set as you're doing that.

I want to start by talking about the available SaaS integrations. This is one of the big differentiators when it comes to how ServiceNow does this. Because our SaaS software — these applications all live in the cloud, they're all hosted outside of our environment, they're not on our devices — we have to look for other ways to get data out of these environments so that we can actually make good decisions around what we're spending on the software, who's actually using it, and how these things are correlated.

In order to do that, we have to build integrations between ServiceNow and these third-party platforms. The great thing is that ServiceNow does make these direct integrations available with these publishers. The list you see on the screen is not exhaustive — these are the heavy hitters, some of the more common ones — but there's a very significant list of major SaaS publishers, and that list grows with every ServiceNow update. Every time ServiceNow moves from Zurich to Australia, generally speaking, you can expect one or two of these to either be added, tweaked, or improved in some way. As a result, you consistently get a more easy-to-use and easy-to-deploy solution when it comes to managing these publishers.

We share this list as we start this conversation to get the gears turning — start thinking about, "oh, we use Microsoft 365, we use DocuSign, we use Zoom." And as you're thinking about that, start comparing it with how much you think you use those. Which publishers are the large ones in your organization? Which ones do you think you're spending the most money on? Those things will help inform our decision making around which ones we want to prioritize as we build a pilot later.

Setting one of these integrations up is actually very, very simple. The first step is making sure that ServiceNow on our end is prepped to do this. That doesn't take a lot of stand-up time. What needs to be done to prepare ServiceNow is making sure we've got SAM Pro or SAM Advanced turned on in our environment — if not already done, very easy to request from the ServiceNow Store. While you're there, also request the SaaS License Management plugin, which you can see the plugin names associated with those on screen.

When you request these things from the ServiceNow Store, you'll schedule when they get deployed to your environment, and then you'll need to follow up and complete the installation from your plugin or application manager on your instance. If we're doing this for the first time, we're going to do this in a non-production environment — but the steps are going to be largely the same whether we're talking about non-production or production instances.

This is going to make sure that the data model and everything is applied with the SAM Pro or SAM Advanced plugins. And then the SaaS License Management plugin is going to give us the ability to create these direct integrations — all of the pre-configurations that come with these will be deployed with the SaaS License Management plugin. That sets the foundation for us to do everything else we need to do here.

The second step is making sure that your publisher app is stood up correctly. In many cases — taking the Microsoft 365 example — setup is usually very simple, done in a couple of steps. The goal is to stand up an OAuth integration. Very frequently you'll create an app or a plugin within that publisher application, generate credentials that will usually include a client ID and a client secret, and that information will be brought back over to ServiceNow to complete the integration.

Generally speaking, the level of access required to do this on those publisher applications is going to be admin-level. So you will want to work with whoever is running your Microsoft application, your Adobe application, your Zoom, and so on. You'll need some level of admin in that third-party system to facilitate getting this completed.

Once that publisher app integration has been stood up and you've got those credentials in hand, you'll be able to quickly stand up a direct integration profile on the ServiceNow side. Within the Software Asset workspace, go into License Operations and you'll be able to create a new direct integration profile that walks you through a guided setup prompting you to enter those credentials. That'll initiate a connection with the third-party platform and start the data flow, and you'll be able to review the creation of software models and data coming in from that third-party platform.

That really is as simple as it gets. Generally speaking, as long as you've got the right internal alignment within your organization, this is something that can take an hour at most. The biggest holdup is usually that second step — you're reliant on somebody within your organization that has admin access to whichever publisher you're trying to integrate.

Once we complete that integration, one of the things that happens automatically is reclamation rules get generated. For those of you that maybe aren't familiar with how SAM works or haven't experienced this before — one of the things ServiceNow Software Asset Management does to help drive optimization in your costs is use these reclamation rules. Reclamation rules are basically the thresholds we set at which we determine, "hey, this person isn't using this subscription to the justification of what we're spending on it."

These reclamation rules help us establish — maybe the threshold is that someone needs to have used the application within the last month or two months, or that over that time frame we want to see them using it a certain amount. These reclamation rules are automatically created when we complete integrations with those publishers, and then you're given the opportunity to adjust them to fit whatever threshold is appropriate for your environment.

As those thresholds get hit — now that we've got that integration bringing data in from the third-party platform, let's use Microsoft as an example — we've said that we want people using it within the last month in order to keep their license. This integration and reclamation rule are going to work together to look at all of the people that have not met that threshold, and create removal candidates — records where we can see this person hasn't met our threshold. ServiceNow is recommending that we reclaim their subscription so that we can either reuse it or, when we go back to renegotiate with Microsoft, say "we actually don't need that many."

When we do that, we have the ability to directly interface back with Microsoft and actually turn off that user's access to complete that reclamation. Now some organizations may be using Entra ID or Okta as a kind of middleware to actually distribute access, so we may need to update that — and we'll talk about what that can look like in just a moment.

Reclamation rules are very, very powerful. Not a lot of setup here — again, these rules are created automatically when we complete the integration with the SaaS publisher. You just have to tune them to make sure they meet your organization's expectations around what those software usage thresholds should be.

As opposed to provisioning users directly within these third-party platforms, let's say your organization is using single sign-on like Entra ID or Okta. If we're trying to reclaim a piece of software where somebody is getting their access via Entra ID, and we go out and tell Zoom "this user can't access this anymore," but then Entra ID comes around behind us and says "yes they can" — because nobody's told us any different — that's a very frequent scenario that can come up. In those cases, we actually want to direct that reclamation through Entra ID or Okta so that it's actually effected, and we're not dealing with different systems telling our SaaS publisher different things.

We can actually get a lot more value out of integrating with Entra ID or Okta than just the ability to facilitate those reclamations. The reason is pretty simple — for most organizations, if you're accessing software you're doing so via single sign-on, and that's being facilitated by one of these applications. As a result, your organization is very often tracking when members of your team access those products via these tools. So if I use my organizational credentials to access one of our applications, it's likely getting routed through Entra ID, and Entra ID is keeping track of the fact that I've done that.

What this does is allow us to use that data via ServiceNow as additional usage information for some of our software providers — including those that maybe don't today make an integration available with ServiceNow. Let's say a software publisher is not on that list and doesn't currently have a direct integration. If we're accessing them via our SSO provider, that means we can get a similar level of detail about when our users are using that software — and what that software is — without having to go through that process. There is a bit of a hierarchy here: if we can get a direct integration, that's great — that's our top priority. If we can't, then we can go to our SSO provider as a backup data source. And if all else fails, there are certainly custom integrations, and we'll talk about that in just a moment.

As you're building your strategy and thinking about which publishers might be relevant to integrate with and build into your pilot, you also need to think about SSO — whether or not it's already integrated with your ServiceNow environment, and whether we would benefit from layering in a SAM integration with our SSO provider. What additional value might we get out of doing that — whether that's discovering additional SaaS software, getting more robust usage data, or facilitating more restrictive reclamations throughout our process.

Let's say the big software you're really trying to manage wasn't on that list, and let's say your organization doesn't use Entra ID or Okta as your SSO tool, or the big publisher you're talking about isn't behind SSO — it has its own unique logins, it's a completely different beast. We need a more direct strategy for getting visibility into who's using it, what we're spending, etc.

Just because those other things don't work doesn't mean we can't integrate with key publishers that you need to manage for your organization. One of the things I want to call out — and we often treat "custom" as a dirty word in the ServiceNow world — but in this case that's completely not the case. When it comes to these SaaS integrations, it's really important that we are meeting that business need. Going the route of a custom integration is in fact a supported SAM feature. It's something we need to do to make sure you're able to achieve your business goals.

One thing I'll mention though — when we're trying to build a custom integration, custom integrations for this space are reliant on the APIs that our SaaS provider makes available. I've seen scenarios in my time working in this space where maybe that provider doesn't have an API at all, they expose no data out to the internet. Maybe they do, but you're not able to see key information about users on your SaaS platform — how they're using it. There might not be any invoicing data available via that API. In some of those cases, we do have to be a little bit more creative in how we source that data. It may not be available via an integration, even a custom one. We may have to look at scheduled imports or some other process to source the data we need to effectively manage those publishers, and we handle that on a case-by-case basis.

If we're scoping out what it might take to build a custom integration with one of these SaaS publishers, number one we're going to research that publisher — determine if they have an API available, what they expose via that API. Can we get user information and relevant usage data? Those sorts of things, so we can understand whether this is even something we should spend time pursuing. Then we're going to define our scope — what is it that we really need to get out of this SaaS integration? Normally it's going to be focused on who's using the product, how much they're using it, and if we can get any kind of rough billing or licensing data associated with that.

From there, assuming we can get all that information, configuring our SaaS API and creating a custom SaaS integration profile are relatively straightforward steps. And the great news is that because this is actually a supported SAM feature and not a completely custom build on the platform, the ability to stand up a custom SaaS integration profile — much like with our direct integration profiles — gives us a guided experience where we can select the means with which we're integrating, provide our credentials assuming we're doing something like OAuth, and actually test and validate that we've got that connection right there within our Software Asset workspace.

It's important to understand that there's a big difference between custom integrations elsewhere on the ServiceNow platform and these custom SaaS integrations. This is a much more scoped and guided custom experience than something like a completely custom API-to-API integration that you might see elsewhere on the platform for other purposes.

Once we've done all that — we've got our data strategy, we know how we're going to get our usage data out of these other publishers and platforms, whether that's a direct integration, an SSO integration, a custom integration, or a combination of all three — we then need to tell ServiceNow how to interpret that data. The way we do this is with our software contracts and software entitlements.

If you've attended any of our previous sessions around software asset management, this will be familiar to you. But a quick refresher — our Software Contracts act as the governing record for our software entitlements. This is what tells ServiceNow when those entitlements should stop and start, the terms around which those software entitlements were purchased, if there's any kind of EULA or maintenance agreements — all of those things are pulled together in our contract space. And then our entitlements act as child records to those contracts.

Our entitlement records are, for the purposes of software asset management, the actual asset records themselves. Our entitlements tell us what we bought, how many, how long we have them, and what the specific measurement terms are for those subscriptions or licenses — whether it's a per-user subscription or a per-device subscription. That data all comes from our entitlements.

We can get some of that information via those direct integrations. But generally speaking it is best to provide that directly to ServiceNow, because very often if we try to source that data directly from our publishers, some of those things can be obfuscated. And we also run the risk of letting the publisher dictate their terms entirely on their own. We really do want to maintain control over confirming what we're actually paying for, the duration, and the number of subscriptions we purchased. All of that comes from our entitlements.

The great news is that in both of these cases, contracts and entitlements are super easy to import via a template. ServiceNow provides a direct downloadable spreadsheet where we fill out key pieces of information — who the contract is with, what the start and end dates are, how many subscriptions we bought, what they cost, start and stop dates for specific entitlements, and from an entitlement perspective, we also want to know if there's a specific publisher part number or SKU number that we're using to identify the software we've purchased.

What ServiceNow is going to do is take all that information and help us produce our compliance position. Are we using more subscriptions than we're paying for? Are we not using enough? Are we at risk of needing to do true-ups or buy more subscriptions? ServiceNow is going to take all this information, compare it with the data coming in from those integrations, and help us establish where we stand as an organization and what we need to do to either optimize or bring ourselves back into compliance.

All of this is centered around our Software Asset Analytics dashboarding. Within our Software Asset Analytics dashboarding, we have a dedicated space for our SaaS products. Here you can see the way this acts as our central hub for managing these things. We can see specifically our total spend within the SaaS categories, our potential savings, our true-up costs, our over-licensed amounts, and the total number of products we're managing from a SaaS perspective. We can also manage and administer the core elements from this view — create direct integrations, create entitlements, such as "Microsoft 365 E3 licenses, we've got 100 of those and each cost us $100, and we've got them for the next three years."

That gives ServiceNow the ability to produce these measurements — what is our total spend, what is our potential savings, and so on. This is a great space for us to start as our foundation or baseline. Especially as we're starting just with SaaS License Management, this is a good opportunity to get into SAM, start with a baseline, and grow out from there. As we jump into our next section in just a moment, we'll talk about why we recommend starting with SaaS and why this is a great place to start building that value proposition, as well as how to build that pilot and integrate it within your overall SAM strategy.

Christine Morris

If you were to implement SaaS License Management, would you know where to start? A: yes, I was already in the middle of it — this session solidified my plan. B: I have a strong idea and feel confident now, thanks to this webinar. C: no, well, maybe — not sure. D: I might have to contact Ondaro for guidance.

Would love for you to put your responses in the chat. A — great idea, we would love to help. C. Another C.

Having been a platform owner myself, I know how hard it is to get funding to buy new products. And that's really one of the great aspects of SAM — you can truly report on it and show the value. It's one module, I think, that really always pays for itself.

Ian Cahall

Absolutely. And we'll talk a little bit more about that on our next slide. Exactly right — SAM is one of those places where that 30% is kind of on the table. For many organizations, if you think about your total spend on software, the amount it would cost to deploy SAM and achieve these starting points or this pilot pales in comparison to the amount you can get back. And it's a consistent output from our engagements where we're working with customers on this.

Christine Morris

I'll turn it back over to you.

Ian Cahall

Yeah, absolutely. Talking a little bit about the why. We start with understanding again — that 30% savings is out there as a potential for where you might be able to take your software asset management program.

One of the things that often comes up when we're trying to understand how we get started is wrapping your head around ServiceNow licensing. For any of the asset management products — if you've joined us for previous sessions, we've touched on this before — the way that ServiceNow does licensing for their asset products is they use what are called subscription units. Subscription units are representative ratios of the number of managed resources per unit, which would have an assigned monthly invoice cost.

When we're trying to figure out the most efficient use of our time in standing up a solution and getting it off the ground to quickly turn around an ROI — and be able to justify more work in adopting more of the product — SaaS License Management is unique because its ratio for subscription units is focused on the number of SaaS users.

At a 15-to-1 ratio, basically for every 15 SaaS users within your organization that are being managed, you're going to pay for one subscription unit. And why this can be advantageous — that may seem like a lot, but I've got way more users than servers. First of all, it's important to understand that this is a deduplication number. If we're talking about all of your SaaS products, one user across all those products counts in this ratio one time — you're not paying one user per application.

That obviously makes this easy to work through. But the other part of this is that because this is our lowest ratio, it's kind of a one-time thing. Generally speaking, if you measure this out to be all of your internal employees within your organization, you don't ever really have to worry too much about this number growing or shrinking — with a few small exceptions, like if your organization makes an acquisition and you've got more users. Otherwise, this is a relatively static number that gives you the ability to not just forecast your costs with ServiceNow SAM, but also gives you the most efficient entry point into the product by focusing on your SaaS elements rather than your on-premises or hybrid environments as your starting point.

And as we do this, we use this as a foundation to determine how we're going to build out our pilot.

In terms of speed to value — once we've identified the number of users within our organization and what we can expect to spend when it comes to managing all of our SaaS applications, we then want to target which SaaS applications we want to focus on for that pilot.

For many of our customers, a pilot in SaaS License Management is something that's completed in around 30 days. Now, depending on your organization — one of the caveats I mentioned before is that very often if we're integrating with one of those third-party platforms, you may be reliant on the administrators for that platform to get you the access needed to complete it. Setting that aside — let's assume they're going to be supportive and collaborative and you'll be able to get those integrations stood up in the time frame you need — your ability to turn around a pilot in this space in under a month is absolutely there. We've done it with customers a number of times.

This gives you the ability to quickly get the product set up, get those top three publishers implemented and integrated with SAM, and start showing savings within that time frame. Now, to actually capture some of those savings, you often have to wait for a contract renewal, or you may have to do a mid-cycle true-up or those sorts of things. But in doing so, you at least know ahead of time what you can expect as you go into those renewals. Let's say we're talking about Microsoft — you're able to reduce your Microsoft spend at your next renewal by $100,000. That is information you can rely on as you head into that renewal, whether it's within that month pilot or further out into the future. You've got that in your back pocket and can go into that renewal from a position of information, knowledge, and power, and actually do that successfully.

How do we actually build that SaaS pilot? We want to start by identifying which publishers you want your organization to pilot with. We recommend starting with three. The publishers you select should be, number one, those that you have a reasonable line of sight to being able to integrate via either that list we talked about or via your single sign-on. We would not necessarily recommend starting with custom integrations, although it is something you can certainly look at if the publisher warrants it.

As you look at these publishers, the things to keep in mind are: number one, which publishers have the largest number of users? Number two, which publishers do you generate the highest annual spend with? And number three, which publishers do you believe you can reasonably get support from their platform administrators within your organization? Will the Microsoft folks come to the table to help you get this integration off the ground?

We want to make sure we source our usage — confirm our integration strategy like we just talked about, and determine how we're actually going to get that data back. Then we want to gather our financials — the software contracts and entitlements related to those in-scope publishers. Make sure we're either looking at an invoice or an actual contract statement from that publisher. Sometimes they make those available directly via your procurement channels, sometimes via their websites or portals. We want a one-time extract to get that data out and put it into ServiceNow.

Then we want to set our goals — what are we targeting for completion of the pilot? Are we trying to get this done in a month? Do we have six weeks? Do we have eight? And really importantly — by the time this is done, what do we want to see as an outcome? Is there a specific savings threshold we're trying to target? Is it 30%? Are we going to be somewhere closer to 10%? What number do we have to hit in order for this to make sense for our organization, for broader adoption, and for this to be deemed a success? And what else are we trying to get out of this — whether it's process efficiencies, better visibility, etc.?

Then we're going to get started. We're going to go out and request those plugins, build our integrations, import our contracts and entitlements, and let ServiceNow do its thing — starting to give us data back around what our spend is, what our potential savings are, where we've got opportunities to improve, and start using that information to drive our negotiations with our publishers.

That wraps the core content for the session. We're going to talk a little bit about next steps, and Christine, I don't know if you want to take us home here.

Christine Morris

Any questions on what we've covered? Very insightful, Ian. No questions.

If this resonates with you, if you're like "I'd love to do this but I don't have the bandwidth — I have a small team and can't do this on my own" — reach out to us. We do have an offering around SaaS pilots.

If you're struggling to figure out where this fits into your roadmap, we have roadmapping services as well. And of course, we've got our Ondaro Propel offering, where we are ultimately augmenting your team to help you continue to drive value.

I will ask one final question, and I would love for you to respond in the chat. Is there a particular topic you would like to hear about in our next session? I know we've done HAM, we've done SAM, we've done SaaS, and we've done AI. Is there something on your mind that you'd like to dig into a little bit deeper?

If you do have something, you'll get an email from us — a follow-up survey — and we'd love for you to share any particular topics you're interested in.

With that, we'll say a huge thanks to those that joined, and thanks to Ian for his insightful talk on SaaS. We hope everyone has a great day.

Ian Cahall

Thanks so much everyone!