At Productiv we love catching up with our customers. I recently had coffee with Matt Roeckel, Director IT and Information Security at Split Software. Split is one of Productiv’s early customers, and Matt shared his perspective on modern SaaS management.

What’s your role at your company? 

I am Matt Roeckel, Director of IT and Information Security at Split Software which is the leading Feature Delivery Platform for engineering teams. My role at Split is to develop, implement and manage our IT strategy. I ensure our employees have the right set of applications and tools to collaborate and get their work done efficiently, at the same time prioritizing information security and compliance.

What was the problem you were facing?

We are a fast-growing SaaS-first company. This has led to a situation where we have as many SaaS apps as employees! I run fast and hard, but it’s hard to catch up. I am negotiating ~2 renewals every week. I often have no access to user usage information for most apps. I want to know what those apps are – are we wasting money, are we exposed to risk, are users not using them to get value?

What made this a challenging, yet critical, problem to solve?

Two issues made it particularly challenging to manage this ever expanding SaaS app portfolio:

• The key information for apps sits in diverse systems i.e. finance and expense systems, contracts and order forms, app-specific dashboards, Okta, etc. Hence, it was very challenging for me to understand what I need to prioritize. I had no visibility. I started building a poor man’s Google Sheet solution (sound familiar?). Pretty soon maintaining the sheet became its own beast. I was spending 3-4 hours every week just consolidating and maintaining information.
• Given information is so fractured, decision making is hard and onerous. For example, for our most expensive SaaS application, what’s our true usage? What do I really need to renew? Renewing licenses just because users are assigned to those currently is not always the best call.

I wanted to move the company beyond SaaS chaos and into a more modern world of SaaS management

How did Productiv help?

Provisioned users or even logged-in users provide an incomplete view for us. I wanted to understand the usage information for SaaS applications. I think of Productiv as my SaaS management command center – it pulls information from multiple sources. From spend, contracts and SSO logins, to application usage by feature and by team – everything is available in one place. No more spreadsheets! Productiv has become the de facto place team members and I go to get answers.

More importantly, it has really helped me streamline how I work and make higher quality business decisions. It tells me what to do and when to do it. For example, I get alerts when a renewal is coming up, when spending has increased, etc. And the alert takes me right to the app, where I get a recommendation on what to renew.

How are things going today? 

With Productiv, I have been able to save 3-4 hours every week – time I can invest in proactively shaping and implementing our IT strategy versus being reactive. I have saved 20%+ on licenses for multiple apps where we had a renewal in the last 6 months given the analytical data Productiv provides, which is difficult to understand from vendor dashboards – something our VP of Finance is very happy about. Things don’t sneak up on me anymore – I love the weekly alerts I get when spend on an app increases, or a renewal is coming up. Finally, I am able to do fast, data-driven analysis on how applications are being used across different departments so I can run programs to drive app adoption – I could never get to that earlier. I think we have overcome SaaS chaos!

I had a great time chatting with Matt. To learn more about some of the benefits Matt is seeing, feel free to schedule a demo with us. Or check out our ebook to get more ideas about how you can rethink SaaS management for your company.