How many Salesforce, Zendesk, or Box instances do you have? Many companies maintain multiple instances of their applications. We’ve seen customers do this for a number of reasons including: data localization (e.g. German data privacy laws), as the result of mergers or acquisitions where business units that were once independent have their own instances, and because of IT policies that encourage teams/business units/regions to own their own instances. This complexity makes it more difficult to fully understand your SaaS portfolio, especially for larger enterprise organizations attempting to do this at scale. In order to provide our customers with a holistic view of applications at the app level and instance level, we’re introducing multi-instance visibility.
With the new multi-instance visibility feature, you can now view aggregate data for an application across multiple instances or dive into a particular instance when analyzing feature usage, license spend, and collaboration between teams. This furthers our commitment to providing you with the best-in-class, enterprise-grade platform for SaaS visibility.
How you can work with multi-instance visibility
Global IT managing multiple instances
Some of our largest customers have multiple instances of apps such as Box, Zendesk, Salesforce, etc. across different business units that are managed by a global IT team. Multi-instance visibility allows the central IT team to easily manage all instances and map a single vendor to all instances of the application. This helps IT teams make better informed decisions around particular applications as well as negotiate global contracts for an entire organization.
Gain insights into instances maintained separately for data sensitivity reasons
Some organizations maintain a separate instance of a tool for their HR, Biz Dev, or Legal teams, to keep sensitive data apart from the broader organization data. With Productiv, you can keep those instances separate and still understand engagement and adoption at both the instance level and at the application level.
Simplifying mergers and acquisitions
When organizations merge or are acquired, there is often the difficult task of reviewing and consolidating app portfolios across organizations. IT teams can help drive value for their organizations by identifying opportunities for streamlining vendor contracts to realize efficiencies and cost savings where there are multiple instances across the newly combined portfolio.
Changes in the product
The changes you see in Productiv around multi-instance availability will be predominantly in the App view.
You may notice a change in your total app count. This is because all instances of an application are now counted as a single application instead of the individual instances of the same application.
When viewing the App List, you’ll notice multiple instances aggregated in the graph view as well as number of instances per app shown in the list view.
When viewing an app, the default view aggregates data for all instances of the application.
You can also click into specific instances for instance-level insights, just as you would before.
This feature drastically reduces the work involved in managing and deriving instances from applications with multiple instances in your organization. We’re excited to deliver this exclusive feature to you as a Productiv user.