How Zluri is revolutionising SaaS app management

Digital transformation has changed the way enterprises operate internally and how communication flows between employees and customers.

Legacy, manual processes are being increasingly automated as business users bring on new software tools to manage and expedite their digital infrastructure.

This new paradigm—accelerated by the immediate transition to remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic—has pushed companies to evolve beyond spreadsheets and emails to modernise their core IT systems and adopt digital solutions that enable operational transformation across the entire enterprise.

As a result, the proliferation of SaaS solutions persists exponentially as businesses continue moving to cloud-based environments. So much so that Fortune Business Markets predicts the SaaS market will grow from $130.69 billion in 2021 to $716.52 billion in 2028.

While SaaS enables companies to more efficiently automate and manage processes across all areas of the enterprise, the management of all of a company’s SaaS solutions has become increasingly complex due to the number of solutions and subsequent issues including governance and security, cost, redundancies, and more.

In short, the manual process of managing those things meant to increase efficiency has become inefficient.

The Zluri story

Zluri was launched in 2020 after the founders went in for a manual audit and discovered that their organisation was paying for nearly 200% more SaaS tools than were being tracked by the IT team, just at their small firm.

They decided to create a suite of tools to rein in SaaS spend and help organisations of all sizes significantly reduce expenses impacting their bottom line. Zluri’s solution has three key strengths:

Discover

Zluri aims to simplify SaaS management by providing IT decision-makers with the visibility they need to make decisions using a unified dashboard for all cloud applications. Through the platform's application discovery tool, business users can view and maintain a complete directory of all their SaaS licences in one place, track usage and spend, provision and deprovision users, and optimise their software stack for cost and efficiency. Zluri’s technology allows IT decision-makers to look at their SaaS usage granularly, making it easy to take action and cut underutilised apps—ultimately impacting the bottom line.

Manage

Beyond discovery, Zluri's AI-powered platform analyses data from all of the organisation’s applications to provide insights on usage patterns and cost optimisation. It can identify apps that are underutilised or duplicated, and provide recommendations for apps that can be replaced with more cost-effective alternatives. Specifically, the platform details when annual renewals will occur and can give specific insight into how many employees are using a certain application to avoid paying for excess licences.

The platform allows users to streamline the procurement process and manage vendor relationships more effectively. Users can easily track vendor information like contracts, purchase orders, and invoices, and receive real-time alerts when important deadlines and milestones are approaching.

Automate

The Zluri suite also helps businesses streamline operations through automation. Notably, IT leaders can create templates for automated onboarding and offboarding. When employees leave an organisation, it can take days or even weeks to manually revoke their application access—leaving the organisation open to having potentially vulnerable information compromised. With Zluri, IT teams can automate this deprovisioning of user access, eliminating hours of manual work and closing the vulnerability window.

For new team members, Zluri can build templates to automate the creation of new user accounts, grant permissions, set up email accounts, and provision devices. These templates can be customised to meet specific needs and can be easily modified as requirements change.

The platform is designed to be user-friendly, with an intuitive interface and customisable dashboards. Businesses can customise their dashboards to display the information most relevant to them and set up automated workflows to streamline app management processes.

Cohort 11 of NetApp Excellerator

Zluri is a part of the latest cohort of NetApp Excellerator, and hopes to gain mentorship and access to prospects and partners. NetApp’s offerings and expertise in hybrid cloud data services are highly relevant to the team because they provide the necessary capabilities and infrastructure to ensure that they can operate effectively, securely, and efficiently in a hybrid cloud environment.