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Drive down SaaS costs by leveraging your SaaS data. Hear how Callum Brown, IT Procurement Manager at REA Group has translated SaaS usage and benchmarking data into major savings. Learn how he’s using these insights to fuel key SaaS decisions and get his best practices for socializing these wins and communicating them to leadership.

Callum Brown

IT Procurement Manager at REA Group

Hear how Callum Brown, IT Procurement Manager at REA Group has translated SaaS usage and benchmarking data into major savings.


Bring On Big Savings with SaaS Benchmarking & Optimization

Drive down SaaS costs by leveraging your SaaS data. Hear how Callum Brown, IT Procurement Manager at REA Group has translated SaaS usage and benchmarking data into major savings. Learn how he’s using these insights to fuel key SaaS decisions and get his best practices for socializing these wins and communicating them to leadership. 


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SaaS is the future of software, the foundation of the hybrid workplace and the cornerstone of employee effectiveness.If you are an IT, Software Asset Management, or Procurement professional or executive looking to harness the power of your SaaS,&nbsp;optimize your investments, save money, and grow your business, check out these sessions from SaaSMe - the Enterprise SaaS Management Event powered by Zylo.

SaaSMe - The SaaS Management Event

Callum Brown: Hello everyone. Welcome to my session. I'm really excited to bring you a quick session on how REA delivers savings using SaaS benchmarking and optimization using Zylo. So I'm Callum Brown, also known as Cal. I'm an IT procurement manager at REA Group and have been there now for four and a half years and a Zylo customer for approximately two years now.Callum Brown: So today we're going to be talking about death by a thousand paper guts. So really the background as to how REA Group decided that we needed a partner with a provider like Zylo and what SaaS management means to us. So kind of digging into the three main pillars that we see of importance to ourselves and we'll jump into the importance of benchmarking, which has been quite a recent thing for us, but we've seen quick success and we love in the future of what Zylo benchmarks looks like.Callum Brown: So we'll tell you a little bit about REA Group today. We really are an Australian startup success story founded, in 1995 and our founders garage in the suburbs of Melbourne. So we're currently listed on the Australian Stock Exchange with a market cap of approximately US 10 and a half billion dollars. So we're definitely no small fry. We're definitely one of the largest technology companies based out of Australia and founded in Australia. So REA, we now have about 3000 employees reaching across 16 brands in three continents. Our core brand is real estate. com. au, which averages 12. 6 million Australian viewers and customers each month. Recently we smashed some significant goals, surpassing Australian$ 1 billion in annual revenue. So we're on the up and we've been growing year on year for so long now. It's such a great story.Callum Brown: So death by a thousand paper cuts. So as I mentioned, I guess this is really where the problem started and how we decided that we needed to partner with Zylo. So I guess prior to having Zylo at REA, we didn't have complete visibility into our paid software inventory, which meant we had a lot of rogue software being brought into the ecosystem with no method of detection. We constantly having newly expensed applications that our expense management system just couldn't uncover unless everything was coded correctly, which more often than not our employees just weren't doing. We had little to no ability to quickly understand utilization and key seat based applications. So optimization just really wasn't a thing for us at the time. So really a culmination of these factors built up over time put pressure on our team and it was time to prioritize SaaS management at REA.Callum Brown: So I'll jump into now how we solved the problem that we've kind of just highlighted. So we kind of put what SaaS management means to REA into three main buckets. This is really all about visibility and eliminating shadow IT and then we have optimization. So making sure that optimization goes beyond just your regular right sizing and so much more. And then we have our always on planning approach. So planning for our renewals, whether they're three years out or 30 days out. So we'll talk a little bit about visibility now.Callum Brown: So visibility for REA, it's all about building an understanding of what is in our SaaS inventory and this create so many opportunities such as eliminating shadow IT, consolidation, it allows us to manage our risks better, having that better understanding of what is in our SaaS ecosystem and allows us to manage our spend so much better, especially in the expense space where we previously have had no visibility into what apps are being expensed and then we have optimization. So the visibility component plays into this significantly. You can't optimize what you can't see. So without the visibility component, the optimization component basically doesn't exist in our eyes. So optimization is all about being able to readily identify optimization opportunities and this has been crucial to helping deliver savings to REA.Callum Brown: So primarily we see optimization as right sizing opportunities. So it allows us to quickly right size our licensing count based off active usage data that we leverage from Zylo. But optimization at REA goes far beyond this. So we look at several things and not limited to, we look at overlap and functionality. So REA, we're a growing business. We have a lot of M& A activity going on. So recently we've moved into the financial services space. We've also moved into India as well. So bringing on all these new businesses, there's significant overlap in functionality and Zylo has played a crucial part of allowing us to understand this and optimize it.Callum Brown: Then we have education opportunities. So education opportunities are more about where can we increase our return on investment, how can we get our employees to engage more with our SaaS products when we are seeing utilization fall below what we see as a healthy threshold.Callum Brown: And then there's recycling unused licenses. So it's making sure the right people have these licenses and that when people aren't using them that they're being recycled to someone who could get value from them.Callum Brown: Then we move into our planning component. So this is all about centrally managing SaaS contracts and Zylo has enabled us to better prepare around our contract milestones and avoid nasty surprises such as auto renewals, enter ops. So we leveraged Zylo concierge, which has quickly allowed us to store contract data and milestone information, which has further allowed us to generate reporting and reminders for our SaaS renewals.Callum Brown: So we're currently in the process of setting up even more reminders and automation using Zylo. So leveraging the features such as the Slack reminders. So you have a renewal, it's 30 days out, 60 days, 90 days. Having those Slack reminders go onto a central point with REA stakeholders is going to be crucial for us to just learning our stakeholders of when to start thinking about certain things about their SaaS renewals. So we look at visibility, which is really the building block for us.Callum Brown: Then we have optimization. We like to say that you can't optimize what you can't see. So visibility plays a big part in our optimization strategy. And then we have planning, we have an always on planning approach at REA that enables us to get the best possible results for our SaaS renewals.Callum Brown: So with visibility, it's really for us, it's about building an understanding of what our SaaS inventory looks like and what it consists of. And this creates so many opportunities but not limited to really helps us eliminate our shadow IT. We've also built a lot of processes around Zylo to kind of disarm the shadow IT problem that we once had. It allows us to consolidate our application so really quickly we can get a glance of where our overlap is and where we can consolidate, especially as M& A activities ramp up at REA group.Callum Brown: Risk management. So previously we have some very strong risk processes at REA for our SaaS management, but we couldn't apply this across the board because we just didn't know what was in the ecosystem and being purchased by the different business units. So this has enabled our risk team as well to get a better understanding of what's out there and what our risks really are.Callum Brown: And then spend management, this is a big one, so spend management kind of enables us to look at our expense applications especially and identify opportunities to essentially consolidate and do all the other things as well.Callum Brown: So jumping into optimization, being able to readily identify opportunities for optimization has been crucial to realizing savings at REA Group. Primarily we see optimization as right sizing our licensing counts based off active usage data given to us by Zylo, but optimization at REA does go beyond this and I think it's really important to think of optimization beyond right sizing. So the key things we also look at is overlap and functionality where we can consolidate education opportunities.Callum Brown: So really trying to drive almost essentially what this really is trying to drive more value from our SaaS investments and get really increase that ROI. And then recycling unused licenses is another big one. So jumping into planning. So before Zylo we actually planned everything on spreadsheets as best as we could, which I think we've all probably been there and we all know it works for a limited amount of time, it's very static and it's not very fluid.Callum Brown: So centrally managing our SaaS contracts has enabled us to better prepare around our contract milestones and avoid nasty surprises such as auto renewals and true ups. Utilizing Zylo concierge has quickly allowed us to store contract data and milestone information, which has further allowed us to generate reporting and reminders for our SaaS renewals.Callum Brown: So we'll jump in a little bit further into why visibility really matters at REA Group. So on the left hand side you'll see a really quick snapshot of a pie graph, which represents our total applications at REA, which have spend against it, whether it's through accounts payable or our expense management system. So at REA Group, the procurement team primarily looks at contracts that exceed a hundred thousand dollars in annual value. So as you'll see there in the graph, only 55 of our apps actually fall under what we would consider to be addressable by the procurement team, which means we really only ever had visibility into these 55 applications and we didn't have visibility into the almost 280 other applications which kind of fall outside of the hundred thousand dollars threshold or are being expensed at REA. So with this being said, prior to implementing Zylo, we only had visibility of approximately 18% of our total applications across the business. Albeit this was a significant portion of our spend for SaaS, but it didn't allow us that overall consolidation opportunity and that risk management. So with that being said, we're now able to see every single application that's being, would spend against it at REA, which we previously haven't been able to. And also just going back on what I said, you can't optimize what you can't see. So this has enabled us significant savings.Callum Brown: So now I'll talk you through optimization and a quick case study of how REA has realized some real savings and some real value using a direct integration with Zylo. So on the left you'll quickly see a graph which has identified a lot of inactive usage for an architecture supplier that we use within REA. So 45% of our licenses on a zero to 30 day period we've seen as active, which is approximately half. And really that's not true value from a SaaS application. 35% of our users, you can see on the right hand side there have never witnessed any activity. So they've been provisioned a license and they have had zero usage, which is quite alarming. So I guess looking at this, we quickly identified that this was quite a sizeable opportunity resulting in the hundreds of thousands of savings. This was actually one of our team's first sizeable wins using utilization reporting through Zylo. So it really helped build credibility for our SaaS management practices at REA and really helped build credibility into our, internally for our partnership with Zylo. Utilization is now a key milestone and checkpoint during our SaaS renewal process, which we'll talk through shortly. But I think it's so important that looking at these optimization opportunities shouldn't just be when you come up to your renewal, it should be an always on approach and this is what we now do quarterly. So kind of touching over a few things that we've already spoken about. This is our planning timeline and this is REA's always on approach for SaaS management and license optimization.Callum Brown: So starting from the left hand side, we've got every single quarter, we come together as a team across several business units now and we look at utilization reporting. So we build an inventory of what our utilization is over every single quarter and we build a bit of a historical view and we kind of use this to prepare for our negotiations coming up. And it also helps fuel our finance team and their forecasts for our SaaS renewals. 180 days out from our renewals we like to forecast future demand leveraging quarterly reporting that we've just spoken about, which will feeds through Zylo. 90 days out, we like to benchmark using Zylo benchmarks to determine the size of the opportunity and how much time and effort we need to put into the renewal. 60 to 90 days out, we like to engage the suppliers for our renewal conversations and kick off those negotiations and then 60 days out try to execute the contract fairly quickly And then post contract execution, again, it's all about quickly getting this information into the using Zylo concierge to help store the contract data and record these key contract data points and milestones to make sure that we can continually to generate that SaaS reporting.Callum Brown: All right, so now I'll talk to you about the importance of benchmarking and REA and how we see it and a little bit about how we communicate it with our executives. So benchmarking at REA. So the importance of benchmarking at REA is really to ensure competitive pricing across the board, so building credibility into our existing supplier agreements as well. So we like to have a look quite often at the moment, we're doing it quarterly just to ensure all of our historical agreements and our agreements that are tied up multiyear are remaining competitive.Callum Brown: So with Zylo benchmarks we're seeing, as more and more data pours into this product, we're seeing that these benchmarks can change slightly. So it's just about making sure that we are remaining competitive. Another data point at your fingertips really to power negotiations. So anything that you can bring to the negotiation table is a data point is always good, it never hurts. This also enables our team to prioritize renewals based on time and effort. So if we're seeing that we are extremely competitive in a benchmark, we're not going to go and put significant amount of time and press the supplier even further, we'll probably just look at it as an opportunity to kind of build a relationship with the supplier even further since we do have competitive pricing. So it allow us to focus on other areas with our vendor management and our supply management practices.Callum Brown: Communicating benchmarking to senior leadership. So given the current economic climate and the explosive growth of SaaS across the globe, communicating our benchmarking wins has aided our execs with confidence when signing off further SaaS investments. Communicating our benchmarking capabilities has gone a long way into building and gaining internal credibility into our SaaS management practices and subsequently enabling more investment in this area.Callum Brown: It was actually quite funny, I woke up this morning, our CFO was current in the UK and she was signing off a contract, quite a significant contract that I sent her last night for signing and we did talk about how we benchmarked significant portion of the agreement through Zylo benchmarks and just the feedback she came back with around how Zylo really is helping pave the way for us in this area. So she was very happy. I think it's just so important to get that executive sponsor and your execs across what you're doing in the SaaS management space. So a fluid example of what we had this morning.Callum Brown: All right, so jumping into a quick case study. When we first became a customer of Zylo benchmarks, one of the first agreements that we benchmarked was actually one that was coming up for renewal in the next three months. So utilizing Zylo benchmarks, we were quickly able to identify that we were paying higher than the average customer and not just 10, 15% higher, significantly more. We identified that this renewal needed to be prioritized due to the state of the pricing. So again, it really helps you, benchmarking really helps you prioritize where you're going to put your time and effort within your team. So quickly after taking this data point, we were able to confirm with the supplier that were paying above their list price and that the pricing that we were currently receiving wasn't in line with the current discounting structure that we had for other products that we bought off them. So really quickly we were able to kind of surface this information with the supplier and leveraging the good relationship we had with them, bringing all these factors together where we're able to deliver 25% savings, which for us is about close to six figures Australian. So really significant savings right off the bat with Zylo benchmarks.Callum Brown: So key takeaways for today, it really is, you really just can't optimize what you can't see. So visibility is so important, as important as optimization is, it's just not possible without that visibility. There really are so many ways you can optimize your spend, not just looking at right sizing opportunities, but doing anything you can to make sure that your return on your investment is high as possible. Fail to plan, plan to fail. So as we said, we always like to have an always on planning approach into our SaaS renewals. It might seem overkill to some people, but the more data you have at your hands when you come to these renewals, the better outcomes you're going to have and the less things you're going to fall between the cracks. So power are your future negotiations with always on utilization reporting similar to what I just said, it's so important and it also helps build, helps build your finance forecasting. So being a good business partner to your finance counterparts and benchmarking can not only deliver savings but can provide time efficiencies. So quickly identifying where you're going to be putting which renewals you want to put time and effort into based off the benchmarks can be super helpful and it's already saved us sign a significant amount of time and allowed us to put more time and effort into the renewals that need it.Callum Brown: So thank you for listening. I really hope you've got something out of the session. If you do want to connect with me, I am on LinkedIn. Even though I am probably on the other side of the world, I'm always happy to chat. So yeah, thank you very much and I hope you're enjoying SaaS Me. See ya.