The adoption of cloud services is growing at an unprecedented pace, with Gartner forecasting the software as a service (SaaS) segment to reach $145 billion in 2022, up from $122.6 billion predicted for 2021. That’s a huge leap forward, but you just need to check your software assets to understand why. Even a small company has at least 5–10 subscriptions to a variety of cloud services: Google Cloud, Slack, Salesforce, or Workday, just to name a few examples. If we scale it up to organizations with thousands of employees, well, that number can reach hundreds or even thousands of SaaS subscriptions.
We at OpenLM are also using some of them, and the fact is that we love great solutions that streamline processes. However, we also know that although managing all these subscriptions is easy at a small company, things get complicated as the number of SaaS services grows alongside the organization’s size.
Collecting data on SaaS application usage
SaaS applications involve a cost which may place a burden on the budget allocated to software. So, next time when you present the software procurement plan to the manager and ask for more money allocated to SaaS, he or she may ask you to justify the cost. And without any data on the actual usage of the cloud services the organization has, it is impossible to argue and win that “battle.” Which leads us to the question: How can you gather data about SaaS and Web-based application usage? You have two options: (1) send out an online questionnaire to the thousands of employees to answer honestly about their software usage, or (2) monitor SaaS applications and get accurate data about actual usage.
The first option is also viable, but it won’t give you the data you need, because:
- Not all employees will answer.
- Not everyone knows which software you are talking about.
- Not everyone remembers exactly how much time they use the software for.
That’s just a few examples.
Collecting actual usage data with OpenLM
You get the most accurate data about cloud services usage by monitoring it. With OpenLM, you can now monitor any Web-based application or cloud service at the organization’s branches worldwide: just type in the URL of the service you want to track, and OpenLM will report on the actual usage of the target application in a single, common report format with options such as heat maps and pie charts.
The Cloud Services monitoring solution is a new feature of the industry-leading OpenLM software, built with privacy in mind: we will monitor only the URLs you want to keep track of. OpenLM won’t log any activity for any other URLs, even if open in the same browser.
Eliminate the costs of unused SaaS applications
It doesn’t make sense to pay a single dime for software employees don’t use. However, without having actual usage data in front of you to spot inactive users, you cannot make a decision; you just pay the bills. With OpenLM, you can now access accurate information about usage and identify stale users; therefore, you have the data at hand to make well-informed decisions about eliminating or increasing the number of subscriptions.
Privacy by design
OpenLM respects your privacy. The solution provides SAM managers with two options to make the most of their Web-based applications or cloud services: you can either install the OpenLM Agent (Windows/Linux: tar.gz .deb .rpm) on the end user workstation and set it up to monitor particular URLs, or you can simply download the OpenLM Browser Agent from the Chrome Web Store and perform the same task. Web-based application monitoring works with both OpenLM Cloud and our on-premise solution. If you have the on-premise version, then you need to install the OpenLM Agent on the end-user’s workstation. If you have OpenLM Cloud, then you just add the Browser Agent extension from the Chrome Web store and start adding the URLs you want to monitor.
Sign up for OpenLM and start optimizing your SaaS applications!
