Productiv To Bring Elastic License Management To Help Accelerate Business Operations
By CIO Review April 26, 2022
ELM is an add-on for the Productiv’s SaaS Intelligence platform that can save Databricks IT staff up to 4,600 hours and make them more productive.
FREMONT, CA: SaaS Intelligence collects billions of data points on employee SaaS usage and transforms them into intelligent, actionable insights. By utilizing SaaS Intelligent Automation, businesses can leverage digital labor to manage data between many systems without integrating them through digital workers to transfer data between systems and conduct operations. This boosts staff productivity by freeing them up to perform other activities. Productiv has come up with its SaaS Intelligence platform capable of automating manual license deprovisioning and licensing tier downgrading operations. By simplifying licensing management, the new Productiv add-on, Elastic License Management (ELM), enables firms like Databricks to cut IT overhead and better control app costs. The IT staff at Databricks saved hundreds of hours previously spent on inefficient manual and scripted operations by implementing Productiv’s solution for tracking real-time app and feature usage and scheduling automated provisioning processes based on this data. Databricks expanded from 600 to 3,000 employees in a few years. Still, the company successfully optimized spending on its collaboration and video conferencing platform by migrating employees who were not using advanced features to the free version, reclaiming 35% of the higher tier licenses for new hires.
“Productiv’s SaaS Intelligence is a unique data-driven approach to SaaS Management because it deeply understands a company’s app portfolio usage down to the feature level,” states Jody Shapiro, CEO and co-founder of Productiv. “The specific insights our SaaS Intelligence platform provides helps companies to proactively govern their SaaS portfolio to deliver superior business outcomes.”
Most businesses have more than 250 SaaS applications, with large corporations often having more than 350. Licensing these extensive portfolios places a significant burden on IT and its operations. Businesses can spend between 2,000 and 4,000 hours per year ” or more ” manually collecting data from each app and then eliminating or updating employee licenses. License occurrences can occur in the millions.
Databricks currently use Productiv’s SaaS Intelligence platform and ELM capabilities to manage IT operations and optimize application spending. Recently, the organization used data-driven insights from Productiv to identify which employees were not utilizing paid features of a video conferencing service and switched them to the free version. Previously at Databricks, deprovisioning was performed on a per-app basis, in batches, via manual license reclamation and proprietary scripting. However, with Productiv, deprovisioning of all apps is now automated on an employee’s leave day, significantly lowering compliance risks.
“Before the Covid pandemic, Databricks managed their portfolio of more than 300 SaaS apps in a spreadsheet. It was straight spreadsheets and exporting logs from, for instance, Office 365 and Okta. It was very cumbersome and time consuming,” comments Ian Kennedy, Director of Corporate Engineering Helpdesk at Databricks. “We would find that we were still being charged for people who hadn’t been here for a while. Overprovisioning, cost savings and time savings are major issues for us and Productiv gives us a better position for bargaining with a SaaS provider. It’s invaluable to have the additional data Productiv provides because without that, a company would be blind coming into a negotiation.”