ServiceNow has joined forces with VendorHawk to rapidly accelerate and expand our support for SaaS Subscription Management. With this acquisition, ServiceNow turbo boosts its capabilities providing a comprehensive Software Asset Management (SAM) solution that will manage both on-premises software and SaaS subscriptions on a single platform.
SAM encompasses the management of software both on-premises and in the cloud as Software-as-a-Service. Today, we offer a robust Software Asset Management capability that provides visibility into software assets across the enterprise throughout their full life cycle. But SaaS is growing swiftly, outpacing an enterprise’s software portfolio growth. “Overall, from 2015 to 2020, IT spending on enterprise application software will grow at 8.6%. During this same period, SaaS growth will be 19.3%, and can be expected to reach $76 billion by 2020.” 1 We expect this to be a growing need at our customers that ServiceNow can solve at scale.
VendorHawk brings SaaS breadth and depth to the table
Today, VendorHawk has broad support for 36,000+ SaaS applications to discover spend and map redundant applications. SaaS subscriptions can sprawl rapidly at companies, often bypassing IT. At one site VendorHawk found 248 SaaS applications that the customer was not aware of. Customers need a safety net to identify rouge SaaS deployments.
VendorHawk also analyzes utilization and performs deep optimization analysis in preparation for contract renewal for many popular applications such as SalesForce, Box, and Google G-Suite to name just a few. To date, ServiceNow SAM has SaaS capabilities for Microsoft Office 365 (Kingston) with others planned for release this year. By adding VendorHawk capabilities to our NOW platform, ServiceNow SAM is fast-tracking the value we can deliver to customers.
Is SaaS over taking your organization?
SaaS subscriptions can sprawl rapidly at companies, often bypassing IT. As a result, companies are often unable to identify which SaaS applications exist and how much is being spent on them. Without full visibility into SaaS usage across the company, enterprises are deploying redundant SaaS applications. Many of these applications are automatically renewed annually but vastly underutilized, if utilized at all.
With the proliferation of SaaS, additional issues arise such as security access risks, granting employees unauthorized access to data circumventing Sarbanes-Oxley controls. IT and security cannot manage SaaS users and applications it is not aware of. As a result, current employees with unauthorized data access go unchecked. Likewise, former employees who leave a company may still have access to confidential data.
Customers need a SAM solution with a strong SaaS subscription management capability to discover, manage and optimize SaaS applications so they can optimize assets and manage applications and users. ServiceNow Software Asset Management will provide customers the ability to perform SAM and SaaS Subscription Management from a single powerful platform.
As we do with all our acquisitions, ServiceNow intends to replatform VendorHawk capabilities into a future release targeted for 2019.
Read more about the acquisition in our April 25th press release.
We hope to see you at Knowledge 18 May 7-10th in Las Vegas where you can hear from our customers, get hands on with our labs and stop by the SAM Pavilion booth!
