Zylo

Ready to uplevel your license optimization game? This session will explore how to leverage Zylo’s usage insights and workflows to translate data into insights and then action! Learn how to measure and drive utilization across your SaaS stack, deprovision and downgrade in real-time and manage licenses across multiple organizations.&nbsp;

Derek McCauley

Senior SaaS Consultant, Zylo

Ready to uplevel your license optimization game? This session will explore how to leverage Zylo’s usage insights and workflows to translate data into insights and then action! Learn how to measure and drive utilization across your SaaS stack, deprovision and downgrade in real-time and manage licenses across multiple organizations. 



Zylo 101: Usage Insights & Workflows

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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

Derek McCauley: Hey everyone, thanks for joining today. Make sure we're in the right place. We're doing the breakout session for Usage insights and workflows. I'll be your host today, Derek McCauley, Senior SaaS Consultant here at Zylo. So thank you guys for joining me. We've got about 20 minutes today. We'll take about 15 minutes of that and really just walk through how we bring the data sources into Zylo for that continual discovery method, what those sources do to help build some of those portfolio usage and benchmarks insights that we're leveraging today. Then really we'll dive into ... workflow, ... a quick example of that in our demo environment as well. So maybe 15 minutes of that and then we'll leave a few minutes left over towards the end for some Q& A. If you guys have any left over at the end. Sound great? Good. Well, like I said, let's talk about sources of truth and data that comes into Zylo and really the biggest things that we want to make sure that are connected in Zylo. You heard Corey talk about this in our Zylo value framework yesterday, but we want to make sure that we get the financial data in and financial data is really AP spend, expense spend. I want to make sure that data is constantly flowing through. That's a part of that data that we need. The second one's really going to be contract data. When is that next contract renewal or end date? How many licenses have we purchased and really getting that data in. And last, it's really utilization. How many provision users do we have? How many active users are out there? When was the last time they logged in? And obviously if business needs require it, there's certainly some ways to collect some custom fields based on what you guys are trying to collect as well. But if you talk about how we bring the most data into Zylo and how that enriches the data or opportunities for savings that are out there, it's the financial, the contract, and utilization data that means the most to us as we walk through that. So we'll touch on insight data and I think as you navigate the platform and into Zylo itself, certainly there is the insights tab and I think this is one of those critical areas that a lot of people go to initially. And as you dive into that and get more in tune with what the initiatives are you're working through, this gives you a great first way to really dive into opportunities that are out there within your business or even just checkpoints along your journey that says you are making the right progress or maybe there's some auditing that you've got to do within those processes too. So we first talk about portfolio insights and really in the portfolio side it's just a quick way, current state, how do you stack up amongst the rest of your applications that are out there and how you prioritize those opportunities amongst your team. The second one is really usage and again, utilization data, and this is one we'll drive heavier on today in the conversation, but you have the utilization data connected. Now whether it be a direct utilization or SSO utilization, either one of those is going to allow you an opportunity to see how often someone's logging in or how active they are in that platform. You want to leverage those data points to then take action and go out and whether we're going to survey the group who has those licenses, if we want to draw those back or just simply take action as we need to based on the business stance that we have today. And then lastly, it's benchmarks, right? We've got portfolio where you can compare yourself against like size companies, how your AP spend is, overall spend app count, and we can also look at popular applications. So what are your top five based on a category, subcategory or function? And then lastly, it's really price benchmark. What is the license count? How many are we going to purchase and what that licensee cost. So those are insights that allow you to get into a little bit more, and we'll dive into that here in a few. But certainly as we talk about workflows and trying to pull back licensing where we need to, utilization data is the heaviest point in that. So when we talk about how do we leverage that, there's two ways or two options to go back through and leverage the usage insights and run the workflows and find the data that you need. There is a way to deprovision, right? We've got inactive users that are no longer leveraging the licenses, we need to deprovision those users. So how do we get to that list? How do we find out how many we're going to deactivate and take action on those? That's that first section. So I'll show you that here in a second. Downgrade is the other one, and that is certainly we have some licenses that are a heavier cost than others. Can we actually downgrade them from a premium license to just a standard licensing and free license that that's available out there? So certainly ways to save, opportunities around each of those. When we talk about the workflow function within Zylo, it is taking all of those things we just talked about, taking that data, taking the utilization data that's there, leveraging that, and really having a one place to allow you to go run a test or a validation method through that process. So here is the users based on this application, I want to go review the user list, filter that down as I need to based on certain criteria that I'm looking for. Maybe that's are they still an active employee, maybe it's a paid license versus a non- paid license, maybe the last 90 days active. Certainly some of those are some very standard items to filter down by. And then from there you can either skip an email process if you don't want to email all the users and get their feedback. Some companies enjoy kind of that ability to be able to take action as they need to. Or if you do want to go survey those individual users and gain that feedback, you are able to go do that. So it's not really a here's the list and I'm going to go take action if I need to. You have an option to go out and survey those users, get their feedback. Yes, they want to keep their license. No, they don't want to keep that license. And it gives us an ability to do that through email alerts. You can review the responses, you can then take action like we talked about deprovision, downgrade, download the list, work with your IT team to get those completed if you need to. And then it's also going to capture each one of those steps, the user list and that complete workflow for you as well. So you can constantly go back to that if you need to. And we heard earlier with the savings events coming through, this is one of those savings events that's... be able to report back up the opportunities that you've saved or identified savings and then turned into a realized savings as well. So the last piece of this is really end user experience. We have a workflow that's ready. We have a user list that we're going to go out and ask for feedback on and they have an option to do that with... Right? They can state that they can return that or keep the license. You can also adjust the messaging that's out there to them maybe for Asana, it's not necessarily the last time that they logged in, but maybe it's the last time they took an active action within maybe a project or event. You can also update the company branding and certainly adjust kind of the message response timeline. Maybe you do want to do this in a very quick amount of time. Obviously if you're running through workflows and getting ready to prepare for a renewal that's coming up, you want to start the process 120 days out by a standard practice, but within that 120 days, this is part of that process. Let's go make sure that we have the right licensees and available. Let's go request some feedback from our user base that's out there. We have some data here, let's go validate that the users who are using it would like to keep using it and take action from there. So I've walked through that in slide form. So I thought I'd jumped back in and really run through this within the platform itself and reference some of those data points that we talked about too. So let me jump through that and then I'll come back to really how we crawl, walk, run as we get into the steps. So I have switched over. You should see the Zylo platform in the demo environment here. Certainly as we go into the insights page, this is the one we referenced. You've got certainly many ways to collect some opportunities or prioritize some issues that you have with maybe multiple users experiencing newly discovered applications, most recently expense apps, those things. But as we talk about workflows and utilization, this is really where it ties into. And so we talk about those direct integrations and how it's pulling that data in. This is a very quick way for you to see where those opportunities are savings at. Right? With Zoom, you'll see in this instance we've got some downgrade users out there. You'll see Salesforce is the same. Zoom, we've got some inactive users as well. And so if we look at maybe Smartsheet for example, we'll see there's 190 inactive users there. If we click view users, it's going to automatically take us to that spot. It's going to automatically filter down to those ones that we referenced based on that insight that we have. We'll look at a license sheet creator and group admin, no and are they active through those pieces. You'll quickly see that there's 190 that they offer to us. One of those quick ones is should we filter that down any further? And we see that quickly 91 plus days now moves us down to 173 users. So if you ever want to filter any further, there are certainly ones here that we reference. Maybe is it in the primary user store, active employee, could be a paid license for another application, something like that. But this quickly gives us the listing that we need. This is the users that we want to go validate, are they still leveraging the tool or not? And we can start a workflow here and we will see that quickly. It gives us the users that we want to review. If we ever want to remove those out of those, you can click those and exclude them. We also have a suppression list. So for example, if maybe you have a C- suite of executives that you don't want to include into these, and each time you can upload a suppression list, it'll exclude those on each workflow that you have. But from there you'll see the same filters we had previously are in here gives us the same user list here as well. And again, if you ever want to just skip the survey itself and not actually email the user base, you can do that as well. Still going to capture the listing for you and then we'll simply just continue through. Each one of these steps like we talked about, we reviewed the users, now we have an option to send a test email. We can adjust who the address is from, the logo that's there, the message that we want to say to the users themselves and actually set a specific date that we want to have those responses returned from. Send the test email, send the email itself, and then it'll start to walk through each one of these. We can then review the responses as we get through those. And from there then it'll give us a full downloaded list that we've actually emailed out and received the responses from. And then again, from there, going back to that crawl, walk, run idea, right? We get back into the idea that we now know how to run these workflows, or at least you have an example of how to do that. A lot of customers, it's a little nerve- wracking to get those things started or actually start to request feedback into that since it hasn't maybe been a part of that process or if it hasn't been systematic before. Sometimes some spreadsheets or things are tracking those as well are just through standard email. So the one thing I would typically reference or best practice is let's start small. Let's pick one of those upcoming workflows or one of those upcoming renewals that you have and the next 120 days and maybe you have direct connection to it and you want to start to run through that. So pick the workflow, let's start to run through those and let's narrow down what specific department that is or maybe a subset of users of who is leveraging that, but just pick one at first and run through that. The best part about those is you can pause that process at any time. You can go back and edit those. And even if you start that and come through, then we will be able to view those as well. Okay, so then we just ran the workflow itself, but I wanted to at least show you kind of where those pieces are at within the system itself. So if you ever have started a workflow and I'm in the demo environment, so you see plenty of them here, many of those are just starts. You'll see send email, action needed, that's if you click into those, it'll take you back to that last step that you were in. You can actually finish those out as you need to. So many ways to get to that. The other side of that would be is we have some that are in progress and certainly some that are completed. And so the completed ones, again, you can go back to this and reference the user list if you ever need to in the future, you can also just have this readily available. And again, a savings event's going to trigger as we talked about with the new enhancements with the platform as well. So excited to have that come through. So I know I ran through those pretty quickly, but wanted to at least give you a quick view into what those pieces are and how you access those items. Since we already ran through that thought it might be good to tie this back to the Zylo value framework. And we heard Corey, again, talk about this previously, but we have these four pillars that mean the most of what you guys are working towards. If we look at just workflows in itself and the data sources that are coming through, we started to work through that with getting the data in, making sure that there's this constant way that we're providing the views and the content that needs to come through there. So whether that's the financial data, utilization data or the contract data, all those need to be constantly coming through the platform so it can feed into and enrich the data set that's coming through on the insights. You then have license optimizations and cost savings avoidance for both of those too. We know that we're looking at how quickly or how often someone is leveraging the application. Is it a critical tool? What is the adoption rate that you guys are leveraging and do we need to go out and validate our user base that's leveraging that? And let's make sure that we reduce what we need to. And then of course the savings comes into play or the avoidance comes into play as you run those workflows, you gain that detail back and you work across teams within the IT group to make sure that we're drawing back those licenses. And then at the time of renewal, again, the procurement team is able to take that detail and go back into that negotiation with the details they need to reduce the licensings that that's there as well. So I know we've talked through quite a bit today. Let me see if we can open that up for some discussion or questions. All right. First question is, how do you convince business leaders to allow you to run workflows if it's outside of their normal process? I would say that if you're convincing business leaders, it probably depends on where the business leader is coming from. There's likely some sort of opportunity or focus that they are looking to achieve. So it might be that there's a savings initiative that's out there, maybe there's a security review that's coming through. There's got to be some sort of way to help frame that up. Typically, I would say probably a good conversation to start with your SaaS consultant and try to understand who you're speaking to and how best to frame that up for you. But oftentimes if we're talking about just leveraging the workflow, starting small and getting bigger does help with that. If they can understand or at least start to see the path that you're working on, which is probably really operationalizing that renewal process, understanding that there's multiple pieces within that process and there is usually one time to do a savings event. So if savings is maybe that initiative that's out there, walking them through the understanding that we have 120 days till our next renewal, we have an opportunity here that shows we have... Maybe there's 20 inactive licenses. You have the contract data that's there as well, which gives you the license seed. Frame that up with a dollar amount if maybe you're talking to a finance leader... 20K savings or even a 5K savings right at a renewal event, it's pretty important. I think that gets you an opportunity to have that conversation a little bit deeper. But again, to focus that a little more deeper into your specific account, just check with your SaaS consultant. They can probably help frame that up a little bit easier. Okay. We have one minute left. It looks like so happy to answer another question. I think see some more breakout sessions happen. Okay, great. Well, I appreciate you guys listening to me today, letting me jump in, excited to share more with you. Of course, reach out to your SaaS consultant, certainly happy to help frame up any of those conversations you have or if you need some support on maybe getting that first workflow run, they'd love to be able to participate and help out. So let us know where we can help and thank you.