Author: Hyoun Park

Key Stakeholders: Chief Information Officers, Chief Technology Officers, Chief Financial Officers, Finance and Accounts Payable Directors and Managers, Human Resources Officers, Procurement Directors, Software Asset Managers, IT Architects, Vice President/Director/Manager of IT Operations, DevOps Managers, System Architects, Product Managers, IT Sourcing Directors and Managers, IT Procurement Directors and Managers

Why It Matters: SaaS management requires an integrated set of applications to coordinate the business activites driven by SaaS costs, inventory, and usage. With this RESTful API combined with Zylo’s existing application, SaaS optimization capabilities, and integrations, Zylo delivers not only a strong toolkit for companies to support SaaS management, but a platform for businesses to gain a SaaS-centric view of business activities, projects, and goals.

Top Takeaway: With the Zylo API in place, organizations now have a starting point to gain a SaaS-centric view of the business that maps SaaS to the people, processes, projects, technology, and financial drivers of the business.

About the Zylo API

On May 26, 2021, Zylo, a SaaS (Software as a Service) management company, announced the launch of its independent API to provide access to application license and usage data. This API provides companies with the ability to export SaaS subscription data to analytics and asset management tools, use subscription data to push service order workflows to disconnect and optimize subscription usage, and bring new applications into the Zylo platform to support SaaS portfolio optimization.  

In going through the API documentation for the Zylo platform, Amalgam Insights notes that the Zylo API includes access to application-specific subscriptions, data imports, and data exports. Data access includes SaaS categories and subcategories, business units and goals, supplier name, cost center, expense report information, and user license information. Once these fields are mapped to their equivalent categories across applications, Zylo customers will be able to fully synchronize data on an ongoing basis through a RESTful API. 

This API is comparable in some ways to the API provided by Zylo competitor Productiv, but Amalgam Insights notes that the Productiv API both rate-limits and time-limits data batches that are not currently limited in the Zylo API. SaaS Management Bettercloud also has an API for its platform, but Bettercloud’s focus on SaaS operations and its GraphQL and graph analysis makes Bettercloud’s API and platform more aligned to the tactical challenges of workflow and app network analysis rather than finance and accounting.

Business Context for Why This API Matters

Amalgam Insights takes the view that technology expense management should be a core capability for the financially responsible CIO and that SaaS, cloud, and network expense management solutions can be used as the hubs of activity to determine the financial and business activities associated with technology and business transformation. However, one of the biggest challenges to this vision has been the inability for these expense-based platforms to provide their granular data and optimization recommendations to all of the systems that require increasingly detailed technology usage to support business model transformation and agile finance and accounting-based forecasting exercises.

In addition, SaaS is one of the fastest-growing spend categories in the business world. As a market, SaaS is expected to grow over 20% annually over the next five years leading to a $275 billion market in 2025. SaaS currently makes up half of all new software spend and roughly 10% of all new technology spend that will occur in 2021. From a practical perspective, Amalgam Insights estimates that SaaS will save approximately 25 billion employee-hours or 12.5 million employee years of manual work this year. And Amalgam Insights also notes that businesses start supporting 250 SaaS apps on their network as soon as they get to 500 employees, on average. After that point, the SaaS count grows incrementally as employee count increases. These are all different ways of pointing out the importance of SaaS, whether it be in context of software spend, IT spend, or employee productivity.

So, SaaS matters as a business spend category and it can potentially be used to support a variety of business management and analysis tasks. But the technological access to this data has often been limited in the past to flat files that required an intermediate level of data translation or summary data that lacked the granularity to help support individual employees, assets, plans, projects, and products dependent on the optimal usage of SaaS.

This is why the Zylo API fundamentally matters from Amalgam Insights’ perspective. In today’s technology world, every application wants to call itself a “platform” upon inception, which makes the word almost meaningless. But from a practical perspective, a technology platform is one that can help manage multiple applications and to bring together the data, workflows, and outputs of multiple applications in an integrated fashion to improve business outcomes. This is the promise of Zylo’s API in providing a SaaS-centric way of looking at the business usage of SaaS for a variety of applications. 

From Amalgam Insights’ perspective, this was the missing link in seeking an app-based vision for tracking, planning, budgeting, and forecasting business activity from a SaaS-based perspective. If apps and the cloud are as important as everyone in the technology and business worlds claims and if digital transformation is truly important to justify the billions being spent on it, businesses need to find a way to track work not only by department and employee, but by application as well. This next level of visualizing work, employee enablement, project resource dependencies, and digital workflow supply chains is what Amalgam Insights ultimately finds most interesting about the emergence of this API.

Recommendations for the Technology Expense Community

Our key recommendation is this: Work to gain a SaaS-centric view of the business that maps SaaS to the people, processes, projects, technology, and financial drivers of the business. 

To contexualize this recommendation, consider that the technology expense community largely comes from three areas at the moment: telecom expense management, software asset management, and cloud cost management (also known as FinOps). These three categories of workers typically bring together some understanding of technology, sourcing, and accounting to help the business based on the IT Rule of 30, which states that every unmanaged IT subscription spend category averages 30% in waste.  By optimizing these spend categories, the technology expense community has proven its worth as we have saved large enterprises millions of dollars while providing visibility to opaque and complex spend categories.

But we are facing a moment of reckoning when technology has become increasingly important to the foundational operations of a company. The COVID pandemic proved the need to both manage and support employees quickly and regardless of their physical location. As connectivity, data access, and application access became the biggest bottlenecks to accessing expertise and completing work that required multiple employees, the need to understand the cost basis of SaaS, the SaaS licenses and access that each employee required to be fully productive, and the infrastructure and security requirements associated with SaaS all became mandatory to track and visualize on a regular basis. 

In this light, the key recommendation Amalgam Insights provides to the technology expense community based on this announcement is clear: it is no longer enough to only cut costs and businesses require a SaaS-centric business view to go along with finance-centric and people-centric views. You may not be in the position to fully act on the repercussions of what you find, but you are in a perfect position to empower your CIO, CFO, and CEO on this vital view of apps that run the business. 

Amalgam Insights believes that the Zylo API combined with the existing Zylo application, data schema, and integrations provides a strong foundation for visualizing the SaaS-enabled enterprise. Whether companies choose to work with Zylo, work with another SaaS management provider, or build their own solution, Amalgam Insights believes that the future of IT management is dependent not only on cost visibility and savings, but on providing a business lens to link technologies to core business functions.

Key Stakeholders: Chief Information Officers, Chief Technology Officers, Vice President/Director/Manager of Platform Engineering, Vice President/Director/Manager of Operations, System Architects, Product Managers, Product Marketing Managers, IT Finance, Software Asset Managers, Sales Operations, Marketing Operations

Why It Matters: As Software as a Service continues to balloon into a $275 billion global market by 2025 and the typical Global 5000 enterprise supports over 1,000 apps over its network, the challenge of SaaS configuration increasingly is linked to employee onboarding and productivity. Just as the battle for enterprise mobility security was a core concern for the 2010s, the battle for SaaS app governance will be a core IT concern for the 2020s.

Key Takeaway: IT departments must coordinate enterprise architects, security and governance teams, and software asset management personnel to ensure that all major SaaS applications considered mission-critical have well-governed configuration testing and management capabilities.

About the Funding Round

On May 19, 2021, application configuration platform Salto announced a $42 million B round led by Accel with participation by Salesforce Ventures and prior investors Lightspeed Venture Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners. This round comes only seven months after a $27 million A round announced in October 2020.

With this round of funding, Salto is expected to continue developing its solution and rapidly hiring. Salto currently supports Salesforce, NetSuite, HubSpot, Workato, and Zuora. These core SaaS applications are all market leaders, but considering the breadth of additional enterprise applications currently in market, the potential value associated with Salto supporting additional solutions is obvious and massive.

What Does Salto Do and Why Is It Worth So Much?

Salto is a solution for configuring business applications in a repeatable, scalable, and governed fashion at a time when the administration of Software as a Service is becoming increasingly complicated and challenging. Salto uses DevOps-based and software development-based tools and methodologies to help enterprise support SaaS at scale.

This mindset comes from Salto’s founders, Rami Tamir, Benny Shnaider, and Gil Hoffer, who collectively founded Salto in 2019 after previously working at Pentacom, Quumranet, and Ravello. Each company ended up exiting for over $100 million, showing the type of track record that venture capital firms love to see.

Salto’s core technology is maintained as an Open Source project (https://github.com/salto-io/salto) and a SaaS toolkit that includes

• Not Another Configuration Language (NaCl… get it?), a structured language to help support and define software configurations
• A command-line interface with operations commands including
  Fetch, which connects to each enterprise application and downloads current configurations for users
• Deploy, which compare your preferred configurations to existing configurations and then creates an execution plan to fix configurations
• A Salto vs-code extension to the vs-code IDE used to interact with NaCl-based files.

The SaaS offering of Salto also supports

• Environments that allow for testing a service instance of an application and can be managed through the Fetch and Deploy applications
• A Git client, which helps users to effectively push or pull changes as needed to support software configuration.

So, why does this matter so much for IT?

Let’s take a step back. We have established that software is one of the greatest force multipliers for human effort in the history of the world. It is nearly impossible to get work done in large enterprises without using at least one or more complex enterprise software solutions, such as an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) or CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system.

To add to this complexity, the dominant deployment mode for software is now Software as a Service, which is growing over 25% per year and drives the majority of new software purchases. Amalgam Insights estimates that the average company with 1000 employees is running 500 applications on their network and about 10% of those apps are centrally managed through IT as key enterprise data assets and workflow managers. These SaaS applications are being updated constantly, to the point that many vendors have given up on providing formal versions and instead simply provide agile updates. Even vendors with formal versions are releasing new functionalities and fixes on a constant basis.

In this era of immense application environments and constant change, companies can easily end up with inconsistent environments across departments and locations as they customize their software deployments with user interface preferences and specific code to match their business needs. Companies need to support their software suites based on business dependencies and make sure that core software solutions are always working for the sake of employee productivity.

Amalgam Insights believes that Salto’s SaaS configuration solution is an important management solution for end-user computing that has not been fully developed as of yet. At a time when everything from paper to on-premises software to hardware is all being replaced by SaaS, companies have either been offered SaaS operations management solutions to govern and secure licenses, Software asset management to manage the inventory of applications, or SaaS expense management to reduce and optimize spend. However, these three families of SaaS management do not effectively govern and audit the configuration and administration of applications

Salto uses NaCl to extract the metadata associated with a software configuration to provide users with a consistent taxonomy, text search, and references to make sure that companies understand what happens when they change their software configurations. Seemingly minor access or usability changes may end up unwittingly breaking business processes and interdepartmental collaboration.

The Value Chain of Salto for Enterprise Environments

The practical result is that Salto has seen customers claim to accelerate update times by 75%. The resulting productivity can be framed in several ways.

First, the terms of the (value of the new solution) * (the number of employees affected). This value should be based on a value based on the average revenue per employee, as employee output is based on revenue, not compensation.

Second, the avoidance of technical debt and avoiding the conflicts of multiple versions or broken versions in production can be estimated.

Third, the value of having visibility to the full configuration and interrelationships that each software system has can lead to better business process management and accelerated business changes. This value may be more difficult to quantify, but is often noticed at the executive level when businesses are trying to make changes.

Fourth, this level of visibility and auditability can lead to more rapid governance and compliance reporting as well as improved protection to potential security vulnerabilities related both to application configuration and the human aspects associated with working on misconfigured applications.

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Altogether, the value of Salto quickly adds up to 1% of an employee’s annual productivity, which Amalgam Insights estimates to be between $3,200 per year.

Hyoun Park, Chief Analyst Amalgam Insights

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It is not unreasonable to think that an employee could quickly lose an hour or two each month from NetSuite or Salesforce configuration issues, either from direct work issues or from the lineage, reporting, and security issues that follow. At the enterprise level, this quickly escalates to over $3 million for every 1,000 employees, making the business case for Salto more obvious.

This is ultimately the case that Salto is making in a SaaS-empowered world and that Accel, Bessemer, Lightspeed, and Salesforce Ventures have signed off nearly $70 million to pursue.

Recommendation for Enterprise IT Departments

Amalgam Insights’ key recommendation in light of this announcement is simple: Work with enterprise architects to ensure that all major SaaS applications considered mission-critical have well-governed configuration testing and management capabilities. 

Enterprise SaaS is currently a $110 billion market that will grow to $275 billion in 2025. In light of this growth and the increasing corporate dependence on SaaS to support business processes, companies must have a solution to support effective SaaS configuration management and changes. In this world of ever-changing technical needs, IT must keep up and ensure that SaaS deployments and updates are governed just as more traditional software, hardware, network, data center, and other IT resources are.

On May 10, 2021, vCom Solutions announced general availability for their IT Lifecycle Management Solution vManager 13.1. This is the first version of vCom that includes cloud FinOps support for Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

This version also includes vManager Marketplace, which allows vCom customers to do comparative purchases of IT services based on real-time pricing across hundreds of network, mobility, and collaboration vendors, “Pay Now” functionality that allows vCom customers’ accounting teams to digitize and pay invoices more easily through the checking account, and mobile analytics to support mobile rate and inventory optimization.

These capabilities reflect several core challenges that Amalgam Insights notes in managing IT. First, cloud Infrastructure as a Service continues to grow extremely rapidly, with all major vendors outpacing industry estimates for revenue growth. Amalgam Insights expects IaaS to continue growing roughly 20% year-over-year, leading to a $275 billion dollar market in 2025. This IaaS trend is part of a bigger trend of public cloud (Software, Platform, and Infrastructure as a Service) where half of all new IT spend in 2021 will come from the public cloud and that the public cloud market will grow to be over $600 billion in 2025.

Second, this spend will come in to face the IT Rule of 30, which states that every unmanaged IT spend category will provide a potential 30% savings opportunity.

The IT Rule of 30 has gone undefeated across network, telecom, mobility, and software and it continues to reign in cloud. As the next $100 billion+ of IaaS spend comes in over the next five years, there will be many billions of dollars in cost savings opportunities.

Third, as IT is increasingly consumerized, companies have more flexibility than ever to choose their providers. However, vendor choice is only useful if companies can effectively manage the sourcing and procurement process. Otherwise, IT departments can fall prey to the analysis paralysis that occurs when the size and detail of data overwhelm the human ability to process data. Vendor choices need to be centralized and provided on an apples-to-apples basis to support effective IT purchases.

Amalgam Insights’ Recommendation

Amalgam Insights believes the combination of platform improvements along with vCom’s current reputation for customer service and managed services should be seen as a valuable combination of capabilities for mid-market organizations seeking both to manage IT costs across all subscription charges and hardware.

With this release, vCom has taken several big steps to quickly make enterprise-grade functionality available to its clients. vCom’s version 13.1 provides several meaningful upgrades for existing customers across cloud, mobility, and payments. Most importantly, this update allows vCom to support cloud costs at a time when mid-market organizations are increasingly either supporting or planning to support million-dollar cloud bills. Amalgam Insights recommends that companies considering a net-new solution for managing IaaS to consider vCom as a solution that will allow holistic visibility across the hybrid cloud (hardware and IaaS) as well as network, telecom, SaaS, collaboration, and mobility.

Key Stakeholders: Chief Information Officers, Chief Technology Officers, Chief Financial Officers, Finance and Accounts Payable Directors and Managers, Human Resources Officers, Procurement Directors, Telecom Directors and Managers, Mobility Directors and Managers, IT Architects, Vice President/Director/Manager of IT Operations, DevOps Managers, System Architects, Product Managers, IT Sourcing Directors and Managers, IT Procurement Directors and Managers

Why It Matters: Technology is a vital component of the business, but technology inventories and analytics are often updated too infrequently, inaccurately, and incompletely for the information to be relevant to real-time business decisions. MetaPort’s capability to map network elements and provide automated updates provides enterprises with greater visibility to the network, which will have downstream effects on the importance of network data for making business decisions.

Top Takeaway: With the acquisition of MetaPort, Calero-MDSL can provide its global customers with advantages in pursuing network transformation and consolidation, aligning network elements to business decisions, and accelerating IT’s ability to be a better partner to businesses.

On April 20, 2021, Technology Expense Management market leader Calero-MDSL, owned by Riverside Partners and Oak Hill Capital Partners, announced the acquisition of MetaPort, a telecom network mapping company. Andres Aguirre, founder and CEO of MetaPort will be joining Calero-MDSL through this acquisition. With this acquisition, Calero-MDSL customers will be better positioned to map their network environments, remove redundant or obsolete circuits, and prepare for network transformation projects.

Calero-MDSL is the current market leader in Technology Expense Management based on technology spend under management, with responsibility for over $14 billion in enterprise technology spend across telecom, network, mobility, software, cloud services, and other technology categories. Calero-MDSL also has a market data management product to support financial data subscriptions where Calero-MDSL is considered the market leader as well.

MetaPort was founded in 2017 and is headquartered in Coral Gables, Florida. MetaPort was founded with the assumption that IT departments could provide greater guidance to businesses if IT infrastructure data could be more transparent and accessible. With this focus, MetaPort has developed a tool that allows enterprises to quickly visualize a full inventory of their current network environment, view and track changes for network details as they are changed through automated updates, search this network information to find all relevant details, explore this data through drill-down and category-specific divisions of networks, and align all network data with its costs. This capability was already valuable to IT departments when MetaPort originally launched, but became even more valuable in the time of the COVID pandemic when the vast majority of technology workers were banished to their homes. As companies deal with the combination of new network investments made over the past year combined with employees’ incipient return to offices, the synchronization and coordination of network elements becomes even more critical to the delivery of technology and maintaining the backbone of connectivity necessary to support businesses in the digital era.

Network visibility is also a vital capability for the technology expense management world. One of the greatest tenets of technology expense management is that any effort to manage and cut costs is only as good as the data and metadata categorization and terminology used to define each piece of technology being managed. The network has long been both vitally important to understand and notoriously difficult to manage on an ongoing basis because of the relative ease of ordering network circuits to support branch offices, pet projects, or quickly emerging business needs associated with new products or services.

In this context, Calero-MDSL’s interest in MetaPort is clear. The ability to quickly gain a full enterprise inventory of network circuits is quite valuable for setting up cost-effective and performance-enhanced software-defined network environments, providing an enterprise environment that allows every employee and project to be sufficiently trunked with data, and to support an analytical view of the business based on the existing data backbone that defines organizational access to collaboration and information.

From an analytics perspective, the MetaPort acquisition is also important because the basis of good business intelligence, analytics, and machine learning is high-quality data that is well documented and updated in real-time. This level of data quality has often been missing in the technology expense management world, where inventories are often only updated when a change is provided on the invoice or when an audit of invoices and service orders is conducted.

Amalgam Insights hopes that this acquisition is part of a new trend in technology expense management that increasingly combines cost management with IT performance and business metrics. The long-term vision of technology expense management is one where technology as a fundamental core driver of business can be tracked from a financial perspective, not only to determine which costs can be reduced but also to understand which technology investments may need to be increased in order to improve business outputs and outcomes. Technology is not just a cost center in the digital era, but often a force multiplier and profit center when used correctly. As companies start to realize that a real-time, comprehensive, and business-mapped technology inventory is a strategic advantage, they will start to use this capability to forecast revenue, operational outputs, and future demand for increased or altered technology augmentation of business efforts.

Recommendations for the Technology Expense Management Community

Based on this acquisition, Amalgam Insights provides the following suggestions.

First, from a strategic perspective, Amalgam Insights urges all Technology Expense Management professionals to figure out how often their inventories are being updated and how complete these updates are in terms of updating cost centers, geographies, use cases, and other business-relevant information. It is not good enough to simply update this information once a year or upon request. Think of your inventories the same way that accountants look at their financial books as something to be monitored and verified on a monthly basis, if not more often. To do this means getting some help from technology built to discover and verify networks, device fleets, and access to cloud and software services. Find out how to accelerate inventory updates for the areas where you are responsible for expense management.

Second, Calero-MDSL customers should work with their Calero-MDSL account teams to get access to MetaPort as soon as possible. Getting automated updates to network hardware and services inventories is a key component to supporting a more connected business. This visibility is especially important for companies that are invested in the Internet of Things, edge computing, or distributed workers that use and share significant amounts of data. This is an area where customers should push Calero-MDSL both to make the capability available and to integrate with Calero-MDSL’s analytics, cost management, and inventory capabilities. Over time, this capability can also be mapped with network performance solutions and business performance maps to determine areas that may need more or less technology support over time.

Third, consider how to use technology inventories, tracked changes, and utilization to provide guidance to business environments. For instance, how does bandwidth support differ for sales-oriented locations compared to research-oriented locations? Are contact center locations ready to support a video-centric, data-centric, or augmented reality approach for high-touch service environments? Have specific areas required more frequent changes or updates because their performance is more variable or because they are having trouble forecasting their demand? Technology is part of the business and needs to be treated as such. Taking this approach is both an opportunity to make technology expense data more respected in the business and to be more involved in the strategic efforts of the business.

Overall, Amalgam Insights is bullish on this acquisition as it represents an opportunity for a major Technology Expense Management vendor to push the market forward in improving the quality, frequency, and variety of data being collected for network inventories. This change can potentially feed a variety of efforts to bring technology discussions and business imperatives closer together. As Calero-MDSL continues to integrate MetaPort into the core technology expense platform and starts to create products around MetaPort’s capabilities, Amalgam Insights expects that new opportunities will come up for technology expense that are more relevant to the CIO, CTO, and enterprise architect roles that are responsible for the strategic acquisition and deployment of technology.

On April 27th, 2021, Vena announced raising a CAD$ 300 million C Round led by Vista Equity Partners. Vena’s prior investors, JMI Equity and Centana Growth Partners, remain active investors and Vista adds two board members, Managing Director Kim Eaton and co-Head of Vista’s Foundation Fund, Marc Teillon. Vista’s current Foundation Fund IV was raised in 2020 and is approximately $4.5 billion, making this US $240 million+ investment a significant portion of this portfolio.

Vena is a business planning, budgeting, and forecasting solution that uses Excel as a front-end interface while coordinating data through a back-end Vena Growth Engine. Since it was founded in 2011, Vena has stood out in the business planning market as a solution that was built to support Excel as a front-end interface while supporting the governance of collaborative consolidation and close management, account reconciliations, and intercompany transactions through back-end coordination that synchronizes the user experience. Vena has traditionally had a strong relationship with the Microsoft technology stack, including running on Azure and supporting Power BI. Over the past decade, this technology support has evolved to support all major data sources used for finance planning. Vena provides a horizontal solution, but has experience in verticals including Banking, Healthcare, Higher Education, Insurance, Manufacturing, and Software.

Over the past decade, Vena has provided supported multiple customers that have achieved 500+% ROI on their investments as organizations have been able to use Vena’s business planning approach to save time, add governance to business reporting by ensuring users always have approved data, provide repeatable structure to previous ad-hoc finance and accounting reports, and accelerate executive time-to-action.

With this investment, Vena Solutions plans to pursue growth. Given the size of this investment, Amalgam Insights expects to see the acceleration of global sales channels as well as increasing verticalization to take full advantage of the value created by developing more dedicated industry-aligned solutions. Given the current $9 billion market cap that Anaplan enjoys on roughly $450 million in annual revenue and the success of Workday Adaptive Planning, it is not difficult to imagine Vena achieving both similar growth and valuations with its new round of funding. Amalgam Insights believes that Vena’s approach is potentially well-suited to general business planning challenges beyond finance and operations, but could be improved additional investment in native data connectors to compete with Workday, Anaplan, and insightsoftware.

Recommendations

Vena Solutions continues to be a business planning solution that Amalgam Insights recommends, as its experience in providing an Excel-based planning solution is unparalleled in the market and its user adoption metrics are Best-in-Class because of its approach. Companies seeking to quickly scale their finance, sales, or workforce planning initiatives should consider Vena. With this increased investment, potential clients should ask Vena for plans on localization, vertical solutions, new products and integrations, and regional partners to support global implementations as the financial barriers to pursue both innovation and growth have obviously been removed.

On April 20, 2021, Datarails, which focuses on financial planning and analysis solutions for small and mid-market organizations, announced raising an $18.5 million Series A round led by Zeev Ventures Fund and joined by existing investors Vertex Ventures Israel and Innovation Endeavors. With this round, Oren Zeev joins the board. Previously, Zeev has invested in finance and accounting firms including GT Nexus and was a co-founder of Tipalti.

Datarails started as a data compliance solution to support financial services companies in 2015, but found market fit in 2020 by offering its data governance capabilities as part of a financial planning tool focused on small and medium-sized businesses using spreadsheets to manage their financial budgeting and planning needs. This pivot makes sense considering that financial planning and analysis has been a hot market over the past decade that has supported the growth of multiple vendors including Adaptive Insights, Anaplan, Board, Jedox, Planful (previously Host Analytics), and Prophix.

However, Amalgam Insights actually considers Datarails to be part of a second generation of FP&A vendors that are focused on making planning solutions more accessible, which also includes Budgyt, Centage Planning Maestro, Cube Software, Fathom, Jirav, Limelight, Pigment, and XLerant.

Among this peer group, Amalgam Insights finds Datarails’ Excel-based approach to be a differentiator. Datarails’ approach allows users to continue using Excel as their interface, but then saves the data in an Azure-hosted SQL database to provide business governance.

In reviewing the product, Amalgam Insights found the Datarails product to provide both the obvious advantages of working within Excel as well as a SaaS-based software interface that provided the full history of cell value and forumla changes and strong visualization capabilities.

Amalgam Insights notes that this approach is similar to the approach that Vena Solutions uses to govern data from an Excel interface. Since its founding in 2011, Vena has raised $173 million in funding with the latest round being raised in September 2020. However, Vena’s typical contract is over $100,000 per year to support business planning across finance and operations while Datarails is targeting smaller companies at a starting cost of $15,000 a year to support a team of up to 8 users and viewers along with an initial one-time installation fee of $5,000.

Conclusion

Overall, Amalgam Insights believes that Datarails’ approach and funding make it a viable option for consideration for organizations between 50 and 500 employees that are working on creating a collaborative budgeting and forecasting process. For these companies, Amalgam Insights expects that Datarails will be fully installed within 8-12 weeks of contract signing and provide a payback period of 6 months or less based on improvements to provide more timely reporting and forecasting, time saved by relevant finance and accounting professionals, and the risk mitigation associated with having data centrally managed compared to being in Excel spreadsheets.

Based on previous analysis, Amalgam Insights believes that this investment would typically provide a 300-400% annual Return on Investment based on the process improvements, productivity increases, and reduced risk associated with budgeting and forecasting reporting on a monthly, quarterly, and annual basis. (Note: This is a general estimate based on past analyses of FP&A projects. If you would like a detailed analysis, please feel free to contact us at sales@amalgaminsights.com)

Key Stakeholders: Chief Information Officers, Chief Technical Officers, Digital Transformation Heads, Director of Engineering, Enterprise Architecture Directors and Managers, Application Architecture Directors and Managers, Financial Systems Directors and Managers

Why It Matters: Analytic and business intelligence deployments struggle to bring insights and analytic outputs back to their initial sources or to enterprise applications because analytics has traditionally been a one-way path from the data source out to the data analyst creating the report or visualization. With this acquisition, ThoughtSpot as an analytic solution can now complete this two-way path to bring data analysis outputs directly back to the data environments and software solutions that the entire company uses.

Top Takeaway: We are still in the earliest stages of integrating data, analytics, and business practices. With this acquisition, ThoughtSpot is continuing to take a leading role in making analytics easier to access and consume at scale.

About the Acquisition

On March 31, ThoughtSpot announced the intent to acquire SeekWell, a reverse ETL solution designed to bring analytic insights and processed data back into applications. This bridge is vitally important to the enterprise analytic world for a couple of reasons.

First, one of the biggest problems in the current world of enterprise analytics is that the end result is all-too-often a static dashboard, visualization, or table that stands alone and needs to be entered into another application for other people to see the insight. Without this entry, the value of that new report or insight is limited to the report writer and the people who have access to the business intelligence or analytics solution in some way. Although analytics platforms have made significant progress over the past decade in making analytic results more available and embedded, the vast majority of enterprise analytics environments today still require significant design and development work to bring analytic insights to end users. Seekwell has solved this problem by bringing processed and analyzed data back to either the initial sources or to new applications that can use aggregated data to present better options and context for its users.

From a practical perspective, this brings analytic insights back to business users even faster than an embedded BI approach that requires prior preparation. This is because business intelligence and reporting still require end users to conduct queries and analysis to get to Insights while bringing analytic data back to core applications brings that data to customized applications and logic that are already aligned to employee workflows. As of today, SeekWell capabilities are available for ThoughtSpot users and are still available as a standalone capability.

Second, this acquisition speaks to a broader challenge in the technology world: the deceptive challenge of a “simple” interface. To create a simple experience, technology vendors need to provide an integrated two-way experience between the user and every system involved. The iPhone is the stereotypical example of this challenge, where the combination of touch interface, smartphone, app store, cloud services, and related devices create a seamless ecosystem via a design-based thought process. This design-based ecosystem still does not fully exist in the analytics world. When ThoughtSpot debuted as a text and search-first solution, it broke the paradigm of business analytics being solely the purview of trained data analysts and report writers by bringing analytics into natural and ordinary language.

Recommendations for the Analytics Community

Our key recommendation is a simple, yet transformative one: enhance your standard business intelligence practices as they are not sufficient to create an analytically-driven business. We are still in the earliest stages of integrating data, analytics, and business practices and the vast majority of employees lack relevant data for the time, location, and context of decision. The vast majority of investment, training, and resources placed into data, analytics, and machine learning over the past 30 years have been focused on simply structuring data so that it is accessible and queryable. However, this structure still requires an intermediate layer of data analysts, data scientists, and application developers simply to translate this data into basic business outputs. This paradigm continues to this day and we are just starting to identify and develop the capabilities to translate data into relevant, contextualized, and timely decisions.

In this context, the combination of Seekwell’s reversed ETL to pull analyzed data back into applications along with Thoughtspot’s focus on making data available to all employees through human language is a powerful combination for opening up data for practical consumption.

On April 5th, 2021, Tellennium, a technology expense management company based in Louisville, Kentucky, announced the launch of its Management of Things approach, which includes pursuit of a registered trademark and the expansion of its telecom expense management platform to include software licenses, utilities, waste, and other operational expenses.

Amalgam Insights believes that this approach is important to consider as technology has fundamentally become a tool that can help reduce the cost of many non-technology based operational expenses. To understand the true value of technology, companies must gain a better understanding of the full operational footprint affected through technology investments.

To find out more about our perspective, check out our Market Alert on this topic written by Senior Research Analyst Kelly Teal.

On March 31, 2021, Productiv, a SaaS Expense and Operations Management company, announced closing of a $45 million dollar C round led by IVP (Insight Venture Partners) joined by current investors Accel, Norwest Venture Partners, Okta Ventures, and new investor Atlassian Ventures. With this round of funding, Productiv has now raised $73 million to support SaaS Management since its founding in 2018.
IVP is known as a growth investor focused on investing in the later stages of growth. Prior IVP investments include Appdynamics, Domo, Dropbox, G2, GitHub, Hopin, Looker, Slack, Tanium, and Zendesk, just to give a flavor of the firm’s background in SaaS, data, and enterprise software, in general.

This round of funding comes at a time when the need for SaaS Management is growing rapidly and SaaS management companies are ripe for acquisition. Amalgam Insights estimates that the global SaaS market will grow to $275 billion in 2025 based on 20% CAGR as the software market continues to grow and as more on-premises software migrates to SaaS. SaaS will make up the majority of new software spend going forward.

In February, SailPoint acquired SaaS operations management company Intello. Earlier in March, LeanIX purchased Cleanshelf to bring SaaS Management into its Corporate IT and Product IT portfolio. Zylo continues to build its executive team with experienced enterprise veterans as it continues to double in size year-over-year. In short, this market is both growing rapidly and seen as an acquisition target by larger security and IT management firms.

In this context, Productiv is holding its own as a leading SaaS management firm. Productiv has doubled its employee count and tripled its revenue over the past year. Productiv is now the second-most mentioned vendor in Amalgam Insights’ SaaS Management inquiries. Over the past year, Productiv has started a free SaaS Management tool, Productiv Essentials, built out a variety of software integrations necessary for IT management and collaboration, and improved analytics and visibility across users, teams, and vendors.

Amalgam Insights’ Take

Of course, Productiv raised this money to sell SaaS Management, but Amalgam Insights expects several specific initiatives going forward.

First, Productiv will improve its partner program to allow more consultancies and systems integrators to build SaaS Management practices around the Productiv product. This represents an opportunity to bring Productiv in through your existing IT managed services providers.

Productiv will also continue to improve real-time insights. It already provides real-time application usage visibility, but Amalgam Insights believes there are additional opportunities to align usage patterns with other corporate metrics, such as project and portfolio management, workforce training, productivity, and budget forecasting as SaaS management supports employee management.

Finally, expect Productiv to start taking fuller advantage of its automated account management capabilities to drive deeper into IT automation. If “there’s an app for that” and Productiv manages all the apps, then Productiv has a lot of administrative and workflow control over the heartbeat of SaaS-using organizations.

Amalgam Insights’ Recommendation

Productiv should continue to be considered as an enterprise SaaS Management vendor with a focus on solving IT challenges. Amalgam Insights continues to recommend Productiv as a potential solution for mid-sized and enterprise IT departments considering SaaS Management solutions and points out Productiv Essentials as a starting point for firms seeking a free introduction to SaaS cost and renewal management.