Accelerating Value with the Enterprise SaaS Management Framework

Meredith Albertson: All right everybody. Are you ready for a true master class in turning strategy into results? We all know that SaaS management is a must for controlling costs and risk, but where do you get started? How do you build a program that actually delivers results? Well, we are thrilled to bring you to Powerhouse Voices today live from Zylo headquarters. We've got Cory Wheeler, who is a co- founder and chief customer officer at Zylo, and we've also got Jason Owens Netflix's ITAM leader who's going to give a rare behind- the- scenes look at how he developed a SaaS transformation strategy at both Netflix and at Salesforce. They're going to talk to you about a real framework, real wins, and day- one moves that you can make to accelerate results. And with that, I'll let Cory and Jason take it away.

Cory Wheeler: Thanks so much, Meredith. Hello everyone and welcome to SaaSMe'25. As Meredith mentioned, I'm Cory Wheeler, chief customer officer and co- founder here at Zylo. For the last 10 years, I have had the good fortune of working with enterprises just entering into SaaS management, helping them define and realize value through their implementation and ongoing success. It's been a thrill. I'm lucky today to be joined by Jason Owens from Netflix. Jason would love for you to introduce yourself today.

Jason Owens: Sure. Thanks, Cory. It's great to be here at SaaS Me'25. My name's Jason Owens. I'm the ITAM program leader at Netflix. I've been there a little shy of a year now and it's been an adventure and probably one of the coolest career stops I've had in my 20 years of IT asset and service management so far.

Cory Wheeler: Prior to that, we began working together with your time over at Salesforce as well, right?

Jason Owens: Correct. I was at Salesforce for almost nine years, started on the service management side, and finished up leading the global ITAM program.

Cory Wheeler: Right on. Okay, well, I'm super excited to provide a couple comments just to enter into the conversation with Jason today, and what I'm going to focus on is outcomes. At Zylo, we are all about client outcomes. We are all about managing the overall customer expectation and customer need, mapping that to client outcomes, and then prescribing tactics that allow our customers to drive success around each of those outcomes. And outcomes are not a large and scary type of thought. Really when we think about SaaS management and what these outcomes are, there are four of them and I want to provide some clarity into those outcomes today. The first outcome that we talk about most often is inventory visibility and insights. Continuous inventory visibility and insights. Most organizations are looking to build a system of record and truly bring together information around each of their SaaS applications into that system of record. It begins with a data- driven discovery of applications mapped to category taxonomies and security detail added to company- specific metadata that allow our clients to have that single source of truth for all software and all software as a service moving forward. The second outcome that we talk about most often is cost avoidance, the ongoing action of driving cost avoidance around the largest applications in your environment. This is specifically true when we talk about true- ups. This is specifically true when we talk about applications where there are considerable amounts of new licenses purchased on a regular basis. The third outcome that we talk about, very similar to cost avoidance, but it's cost savings. It's truly removing those costs from your bottom line built all around, you guessed it, the renewal. And finally, a continuous record of SaaS compliance, always on discovering new applications, identifying risky applications, shadow IT, even identifying risky licenses within those applications as well. So as we talk about those outcomes, Jason, as we work with every one of our customers, they all map themselves into really what's that business need, what brought them to SaaS management, why is SaaS management that strategy that they need to get moving on right away? And then we walk through an exercise that maps those four outcomes that I just talked through. In your time now at Netflix, what are the outcomes that you're aligning your organization with as albeit your a little bit earlier in your overall evolution, but how are you mapping to those outcomes today?

Jason Owens: Yeah, that's a great question, Cory. So really we're super early in our crawl, walk, run perspective. We're working through building the foundations of our SaaS management program and inventory is critical. You have to know what you have in the estate right? Day one, you can't have actionable insights if you don't have the data to know what you have in your environment. So having that list, having the integrations to know who's expensed what software. What software has been purchased on PO, and then be able to look and say, " Okay, here's what we have in the estate. Which of these things are duplicative? Are we even auditing for usage? Are we even auditing for termed users in some of these platforms?" So just knowing what you have in the estate is critical. The second thing is cost avoidance, which is really where you can start to build the name for your program, is to go and say, " Hey, we're going to have regular repeated process and procedure around." We're checking to see if these licenses even before you get to usage and start to dive into usage reclamation. Just knowing do we have 10, 20, 40, 50 platforms that have dozens or hundreds or more of termed users with licenses still assigned because that becomes renewal risk. And so just from a cost avoidance perspective, if you're bumping up against license caps and you have 10 to 15% of your license footprint assigned to termed users and you're not paying attention to that, your procurement organization or your product owners are going out and say, "Oh, we're at the license cap. We need to go buy another 50 or a hundred or 300 seats." Where maybe you have that many seats in termed users and you haven't just regularly been doing term user reclamation audits. So from a cost avoidance perspective, starting to do those repeatable monthly audits where you're pulling back unused licenses even before you get to monthly usage, that's crawl and then walk is the monthly usage reclamation. When you start doing those two things, then you start building the name for your program around, hey, we are invested in wisely spending our enterprise dollars because I don't know about everywhere else, but these days, especially with everything that's going on, we expect budgets to probably continue to get tighter. We're not going to just magically get more budget. And so the way for us to do that is to go find the opportunities and to really optimize those costs of what we've been given and show that we're being good stewards of those dollars. Then as we move forward and we look at the cost savings, as long as we're doing our work, running our monthly run books, taking our audits from both a term reclamation and a usage and utilization perspective, then what we build is a foundation for our product owners and sourcing of procurement teams so that they then have a right- sized license footprint going into the renewal event. So they're not coming into a six- month or a three- month window where, and we all know enterprise software vendors, they have a book of business, they pipeline, I came from Salesforce. They are all looking to back every and maybe back into a number is a little harsh, but as an asset manager, I know that every enterprise software sales vendor out there is trying to back me into what they have forecast for their coming year for their sales leadership. And that's okay to talk to and it's okay to know, and as asset managers, we should be having open and clear conversations about that so that we're all on the same page that what we're doing is reducing cost risk for our organizations through giving better data and better- optimized license footprints over the life cycle of the contract. And then really when you get to the fourth thing, the record of compliance, what that allows us to do is generally historically in the SaaS space, your record of compliance was your admin portal for the SaaS vendor. And what we've seen is that is becoming problematic at times because we may not always be able to pull what our historical record of licensing was from a vendor due to whatever reason. So it helps us from both an internal audit and an external potential third- party audit perspective to be able to say, " Historically, this is the license position we have had in this third- party SaaS software over time when that may not be always visible directly in the third- party vendor's website."

Cory Wheeler: Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Maybe provide a little context around this as you talk about your goals. I think you have a unique reporting structure for ITAM within Netflix today, very close to procurement, and IT, what does that reporting structure look like for you?

Jason Owens: I am so fortunate and candidly it's one of the main reasons that I moved over to Netflix is that I actually report up through our tech sourcing and operations department. I have a great leader, Kim Master, she leads hardware and software procurement from a strategic tech sourcing perspective for Netflix in tech organization, and being able to sit in IT asset management hand in hand with hardware and software procurement means that we have a significantly better relationship and we're able to prep ahead of renewals. We're able to have strategic conversations around what does the procurement organization need on a daily basis from us. What do we need from them when it comes to contract concierge? How do we make sure that all of the data that's necessary to be in the platform so that we can make informed, insightful decisions is there? I think we've talked about this in the past. There's a couple of places that ITAM can live, right? It can live in the security org and really all you care about at that point is security risk or data risk. It can live in a governance org and then you kind of care about a little bit about financial risk and a little bit about internal risk. You can sit in finance and then really all you care about as an IT asset manager is dollars and cents. But because we sit in the CIO IT organization, we have this really great intersection of governance, security, cost risk, and what really pulls it together by being in the IT organization is that we sit and can see what our impact is on the stakeholders and we can take that stakeholder impact and use it to inform the conversations around all the type of risks that we manage as IT asset managers and have I think what is a holistic perspective on how to run an asset management program in 2025. I think it's critical that if your ITAM program is not sitting in IT and doesn't sit at the juncture of all those things, you should have a serious conversation about is it in the right place.

Cory Wheeler: I totally agree, and I love that tech sourcing is also alongside of view within IT, which is somewhat atypical.

Jason Owens: It's very atypical.

Cory Wheeler: That's where we see the breakdown most or the challenge most. And when we talk about those outcomes, it's very clear for ITAM teams to be driving cost avoidance, but how do you jump over that final hurdle of engaging with procurement, converting that optimization opportunity into realized savings at renewal? I think that's fantastic and you have all of the right stakeholders together to be able to drive that full outcome. So let's go back to those four outcomes, inventory, cost avoidance, cost savings, and compliance even early in your program, how do you put metrics? How do you track that? How do you measure at a high level, how do you differentiate, for example, between what is avoidance and what's savings? Maybe give us a peek into how you drive management and measurement of each of those areas.

Jason Owens: Sure. So when it comes to inventory, it's just what do we have? Is there anything new? Has anything stopped being used? Do we have a contract that has expired and we haven't seen a renewal for that gives us an action item that we say, " Hey, was there a renewal? Did it get missed? Do we need to go out and find this or is this truly a deprecated application that we can pull off?"

Cory Wheeler: Are you also looking at the total application count, the full size of the environment, or do you really focus in on a specified set of apps?

Jason Owens: So we focus on a specified set of apps. It's important that we know what the total estate is today, but we're really starting small with our program because we're not trying to boil the ocean and take over lifecycle management of every single one of these apps. So we have a core set of 40 that we're really managing the licensed lifecycle today. And what we've done is over the last nine months, we've taken those 40 apps. We've stood up monthly run books on how do you assign, how do you deprecate a license, how do you down- level a license, if there's data considerations, how does that get reassigned and who do you reassign it to? And we have run books and templates for all of that work that we didn't have nine months ago. And so what we're doing on a monthly basis is we're auditing first. A few months ago we started auditing for terms, now we're auditing for usage and utilization and we have our core set of direct integrations in Zylo, and then we're also on a weekly basis expanding the manual usage connect data that we're uploading to Zylo so that we are continuing to make more and better- informed decisions each month. So what we're doing is we take that core set and then it becomes not really a Ron Popeil moment, but it's kind of like set it and forget it, and that just becomes process and we do it every month and then we add new ones each month, and we're really fortunate we're adding a licensed operations team this year that we're really going to continue that once we've got really good at this core- 40. We're going to transition those to that licensed operations team, and then my software asset managers are going to continue to go and build and work down out from our in- tech owned apps first, then our broader IT apps, and then we're going to what I like to call a provider of choice internally at Netflix so that if there's anybody that is an app owner or a product owner that owns an application or a set of applications, they can look to us and we can say, " Hey, we can enroll you and provide you this licensed life cycle service either at no cost or maybe a fractional headcount, but it's something that will reduce your cost overall long- term to be a product or application.

Cory Wheeler: I think that's great. Maybe this was before your time at Netflix, but was there a turning point for the organization where they realized that SaaS management as a core output of ITAM needed to be undertaken and needed to be a priority internally? My second question to that is how'd you get to that first set of 40 applications as you were beginning to prioritize?

Jason Owens: Candidly, I think the reason that I'm there is because they had that realization that we needed to attack that as well as look at things on the hardware side and the mobility side as well and so great realization. So I'm here and how did we come to that set of 40 apps? Well, it was not 100% well thought out. It was we have some product owners, we have some org changes, we need somebody to take care of licensed lifecycle management on this set of apps that are all owned by IT. And so we raised our hand, and not to say that it's been smooth sailing from the start, but I like to say that calm waters don't make strong sailors. And so we have really leaned in on that work and Lauren Woods on my team has been fantastic and has really grown into a great software asset manager over this last year and leaned in on some of those 40 apps and things that were uncomfortable to lean into at times and figuring out what does it mean to manage this product when we've never had to manage the lifecycle of it before, let alone we're being asked product owner questions almost on a daily basis for some of those things.

Cory Wheeler: I think you're going to have to develop that core capability to be onboarding new applications, defining subject matter expertise, and rolling that out. The vision is fantastic. I think it's very familiar IT- managed apps those are typically the apps that a lot of our clients prioritize first because they're within that bubble. They're large applications, they're within that bubble of IT, and ownership and governance. There's less rocking the boat and it's really a value- added service back to IT, which aligns the organization. As you talk stacking wins and being able to build beginning and getting your own house in order is definitely a priority there.

Jason Owens: Absolutely. Because if you're not taking care of your own internal apps, how can you be a provider of choice externally?

Cory Wheeler: Yeah. Yeah. Were there any insights, were there any gotchas, were there any big outcomes that you brought with you from your former role and organization that your intent to implement or have already implemented now at Netflix?

Jason Owens: Yeah, so it's really interesting when you look at Netflix has traditionally been a fully federated IT asset management shop where ITAM is kind of advisory services and says, " Hey, go do these things." When I was at Salesforce, we had a fully centralized IT asset management shop. Both the operations tactics and strategy all rolled up through me and it has not been easy to change my mindset. There were times three to six months in where I thought, what is going on? How do I bend the curve? How do I bring savings, avoidance, better data to this organization where I don't have discrete control over the asset management outcomes? It just comes back to relationships and stakeholder ownership and stakeholder management. And the big thing was is that translated from Salesforce 100%. But I think at times I was kind of caught up in the, well, this is a completely different organizational structure. How does it work? Well, literally you get back to brass tacks, you build the relationships, you figure out what do people need, how can you deliver the services and how do you give them access to the outcomes they need to be successful.

Cory Wheeler: Yeah, that relationship capital is something that you've always talked about. Building those relationships is so critical to launching any organization, and it's always been striking to me how your vision aligns long- term with continuing to have a federated environment, but having license optimization and some of the tactics brought into a central team to drive outcomes at scale.

Jason Owens: Exactly.

Cory Wheeler: Which makes total sense.

Jason Owens: And I think when I look at the asset manager journey at Salesforce when I joined Salesforce, it was very similar to where Netflix is today, and I feel very fortunate that I kind of had this opportunity to take all of this almost decade of learning and come back and do things that maybe we didn't do right the first time and do them better. And so it's like, no, we don't have to centralize everything, but some things make sense to centralize, particularly when you get to the scale of 15, 000 plus employees. There's some things that should be centralized because then you can have repeatable tasks that can be done more efficiently and effectively and then automate as you go forward.

Cory Wheeler: Yeah. So for our listeners, maybe you get a little bit tactical for us. Where does license optimization, and we talked about our outcomes license optimization, which is really avoidance, and then converting that over to cost savings. Maybe walk through how that fits into your strategy, what your run book is for those 40 apps to drive monthly activities and then renewal- based activities as well.

Jason Owens: Yeah. So really in order to set up the renewal- based activities, you have to be doing the monthly activities, otherwise, you're going to just be backed into a price number and they're going to change your per- unit pricing. So really as we've stood up the run books as we've delivered the templated work and we've started to work through term audits on usage and utilization audits, we pulled back 5, 000 licenses in Q1 across those 40 apps. And what that does is it immediately optimizes the license footprint. Some of those things are renewing later this year outside of the three or six- month window. Some aren't renewing until next year. But having that smooth line of licenses is much better when we're having stakeholder conversations with our third- party vendors because then it looks like, not that it looks like we're being fully transparent on what our actual need is over the course of the contract. There's not an inflated sense on the vendor's end of what our contractual need is. And because of that, we're able to then go into the renewal cycle and hand over to Nicole and Kim and the team and say, " Here you go. Here's what our historical license position has been. Here's the smooth curve. We didn't have a 40% drop in the last three months of the renewal that the vendor's going to come back and arbitrarily try and change pricing." And so it really fosters a significantly improved communication relationship with your third- party vendors too. And I think that's a critical component that we don't talk about often enough, is that our people are using third- party apps to get work done. It is critical that we have really strong relationships with those third- party software vendors so that our people can do their jobs to be done and not have a sales VP that's upset because they had 40% of our revenue that they had forecast. That's not where it should be. So overall it creates a healthier vendor environment as well.

Cory Wheeler: I love it because so many of the clients that we work with prepare for renewals and it's about that renewal event. It's the third outcome which is cost savings, cost savings. But I like how you framed that out that if you're waiting until the very end of the year to prepare like heck before that renewal, it's almost like cramming before a test. You're going to see license swings. You're going to see probably-

Jason Owens: You're going to see pricing swings. You're going to see... You're probably not going to get the best discount. You're not going to... You're going to have a lot of churn around the renewal event that you probably if you are appropriately working through your SaaS lifecycle, you will save your procurement org time and churn going through the renewal event.

Cory Wheeler: Yeah, because the vendor's going to come to you at renewal with the expectation that you're renewing the same license count, and if you're going in trying to pull out a significant amount at the very end versus staying right- sized throughout the term, then you've got to go through those alignment conversations. It's a much more difficult conversation for procurement and it feels a little more slash- and- burn than continuous right-sized.

Jason Owens: It's too transactional.

Cory Wheeler: That's great. And you've prioritized apps that is most important with, you've begun with those 40 and you'll be growing from there. So I think that's a really good way to think about should we just be cramming before the test, at renewal, or should we be looking to maintain the right position throughout the term of our agreement? I think that's really the best practice here. So then I want to pick up on another statement you made really around these apps are helping your employees get their work done and every one of our clients think in that similar manner that you've got to be able to drive an overall strategy without disrupting the employee experience. So how do you at Netflix and how does Netflix in a broader way balance governance and change management and controls around software which you have to play a central role in to some degree, but also the freedom to be able to get their work done to seamlessly get requests in for applications and go about their day? It's very difficult for most of our clients today.

Jason Owens: If there's anybody that has figured it out-

Cory Wheeler: Right.

Jason Owens: ...I'd love to talk to them. I don't think that it exists anywhere there is an ITAM or a SAM program that has truly solved this issue, and that's okay. I think we're all on a journey here to figure out how do we get our people the tools they need when they need them, and then get them back when they don't need them. And so what our concept here at Netflix is that of the paved path or giving solutions upfront so that we have an ease of access for the preferred tools. Historically, Netflix has been about freedom and responsibility, and anyone can go get any tool they need to do their job. However, our perspective is if we can lay out a vision of if you need this product to do this job, come here and get it easily and then let us know when you're not using it or if you don't use it in 90 days, we're going to take it back.

Cory Wheeler: This kind of hits into that concept because you've created such a right- sized environment where you're doing monthly audits. Do you also have an administrative buffer or activity on the backend where an employee then is re- requesting software that they may not have used for a few months? How do you balance the governance, the change around that as well?

Jason Owens: There's always going to be some boomerang for software license reclamation. It just always exists, particularly you have people that need some tools either on a quarterly or a biannual basis for planning or just regular business cadences. My perspective is that's okay because if they're using it once in six months, it's better for us to not have the overhead of carrying the license for the other five, six months and the minimal overhead of if it's a manual assigned license of the 30 to 60 seconds worth of work for my team is more than paid for by the optimized license count when we go into the renewal of it.

Cory Wheeler: Sure. So then as you're thinking, I want to take a dual look at your program right now and talk about outcomes, and I love a lot of the framing that you put around how you're building your program, but I want to start at the very top. As you think about your time at Salesforce, operationalizing ITAM over time, coming into SaaS management, Salesforce early adopter, innovative organization now over to Netflix, which a lot of similar values, but also some differences. What are the largest outcomes that you can think of in your time? What are those largest results, the value that you've been able to articulate as a result of putting a pragmatic approach around SaaS, decentralized, sprawl, chaos, Wild West? What are those largest outcomes that you look back on and that you peg your program to on an annual basis?

Jason Owens: Yeah. There's one that I'm particularly proud of. I'm not going to say the vendor obviously, but entering our third year of an agreement with a vendor and we were able to size the license position by over 60% and we had reduction rights, which hats off to tech sourcing and operations the category manager that negotiated that renewal gave us right of reduction, not even at the end of the renewal, but during the renewal terms. And we were able to save over seven figures and just off of sitting down and looking at the contract, looking at the usage, and comparing it to the data we had in Zylo, that is a big keystone win. And those are the kind of things, yes, I talk about stacking the small wins, but it's also important to go find those big ones too. And those are the ways that you build trust with your senior leadership and with your business partners is that you're going out and saying, " Hey, we have this opportunity here and then work with sourcing and working with procurement and then deliver that cost savings.

Cory Wheeler: Yeah. What we find is that in the modern enterprise today, there's just no one with that focus on those apps, and once you put focus and common sense applied to how you are utilizing that technology, that asset, that investment, it becomes very, very clear. But software is completely distributed. Every single business unit owns software, procurement is then helping execute on renewals, very detached and siloed organizations that I often put people at ease by saying all SaaS management is focus and it's become so decentralized and it's such a mess that once you put focus on it, it becomes very, very clear. And I think you've done that in a really terrific way at both Salesforce and Netflix.

Jason Owens: Well, thank you. I like to say that software asset management is herding cats by talking to the fleas on their tail. It really is, and it's about talking, it's about having those conversations. It's about shining a light and sunshining where the opportunities are and then bringing the right parties and stakeholders together that can make a decision and then going and executing it.

Cory Wheeler: Okay, so we've started on the high- level outcomes. You have a concept that I'd love you to talk to a little bit that is building high- level outcomes through what you've referred to or coined as stacking up nickels. And so as you think about rolling out ITAM strategy around SaaS, talk about your find the nickels concept and how that's just as powerful.

Jason Owens: So I didn't have a name for that concept until a previous senior leader, Joe Lawless came. He's like, " Yeah, find the nickels." And I'm like, " That's exactly what we've been doing," right? It's you find the small wins, you stack them together, but the most critical part is that you share and celebrate them because, in so many asset management programs, you have SAM leaders, you have asset managers that are doing this work, that are doing the cost avoidance, they're doing the audits, but they are so focused on the activities and the actions and the process and the procedure that the most critical component of an asset manager's career is how do you sunshine and share that information to leadership. So they don't see asset management as a cost center, but they see it as a strategic partner to build additional investment into other strategic initiatives through cost savings and cost avoidance. And that's really what it comes down to. It's go find the 40 licenses in a video editing software platform that you're not using this month and bring them back and then repeat that month over month and build the trust and say, " Hey, for the year, I can go pull a roll- up report." We can put the per unit cost to all those and say, " Hey, there's the cost avoidance that we delivered, and that's going to enable that once sourcing and procurement goes and negotiates those renewals, that's going to unlock cost savings that directly reduces our software budget on a year over year basis."

Cory Wheeler: Yeah. Then do you apply stacking the nickels? Do you apply that where every single one of your managed applications, if there's not the largest outcome, you're also stacking up those nickels and adding them together so that you've got that holistic kind of report out at the top?

Jason Owens: Absolutely. Yeah. We track some of it manually today, but we're working on getting more automated reporting around that, and I know we've had conversations about that, that I'd love to have that opportunity to just have a stakeholder view in Zylo that then becomes like, here's my CIO level report for all of those nickels that we stacked this year.

Cory Wheeler: Year. I love that. We're going to have a dashboards meeting. It's going to be wonderful.

Jason Owens: I know.

Cory Wheeler: Okay. So I would summarize all of that as really putting focus around a dedicated, prioritized group of applications that you're able to manage the lifecycle allows you to drive a high- level strategy around optimization to work well within your procurement and IT orgs to execute on cost savings all while broadening out that vision to be able to apply SaaS management principles across the whole org. I think it's simple. I think it's effective in a large enterprise, and I love the vision that you've put around it. I want to talk through a few vision larger questions as we close out the conversation. I think we could talk like this for all day long if we were given the time.

Jason Owens: In case anybody didn't notice.

Cory Wheeler: So the hot topic of our times, I'd like to talk about AI a little bit. AI is affecting every application, every business practice throughout an organization, and there's two huge ways in which it affects our SaaS management clients, and I'd love to hear your thought on it. How are you thinking of or looking to leverage AI as a part of your core ITAM output and execution, and how are you tackling AI internally at Netflix around compliance, around consumption metering, measurement of that? It's really starting to turn the traditional models of software on their head a little bit. So I'd love to hear how you're looking at AI and then how you're managing AI as well from an ITAM perspective.

Jason Owens: Personally, within my ITAM program, we leverage AI. With Netflix's memo culture, I will not ever write a memo without taking a first pass through our internal chat product and getting a high level, and then I will go back and rewrite the whole thing, but it saves me the 80% thought effort of having to come up with that initial draft. So from a speed- to- value perspective, we're using it for our run books. We have a template and says, " Hey, go write a run book for this," and then it's never perfect, but it saves time. And it unlocks additional value, and that's how we're able to tackle and do more and get to more apps. From an enterprise risk perspective, I'm so fortunate that we have a great legal team that is on the forefront of IP protection, on the forefront of making sure that anything that has an AI feature is reviewed and vetted by the legal team to make sure that terms are in place, that we are not training external models with our internal data, and I think that's critical. From an asset manager's perspective there is so much potential risk to the enterprise with candidly, a lot of the AI products out there are fly- by- night vendors that are just trying to, " Hey, we have this AI product-

Cory Wheeler: They're early.

Jason Owens: ...we're an early adopter." They don't have role- based access controls, they don't differentiate the data. They're choosing to train their model from what you're using as an input, and there's so much potential risk with some of these vendors that you have to have a strong partnership with your legal department before enabling AI features in any of your products.

Cory Wheeler: Makes a ton of sense. Going from AI, something that you're passionate about as well is automation.

Jason Owens: Yes.

Cory Wheeler: And you're leaning into a pretty big vision around the centralization of data through automation, utilization data into Zylo as your system of record. Maybe speak to what that vision looks like for you to drive automation into what you've coined as wanting to have the world's best SaaS management organization and operationalizing that, which we couldn't be more excited about.

Jason Owens: I love that, and from an automation perspective, when I look at my software asset managers that are on the team, what I don't want them doing is toiling. I don't want them logging into an admin portal, downloading a CSV, deleting some of the rows, and then re- uploading it via usage inaudible. That's not a great use of the art and science of software asset management. What I would love is for all of that data to just appear in an automated fashion, and then they can go take the insights and apply their software asset management skills to go action reductions, normalization, rationalization because that's where we then unlock the run component on the crawl, walk, run of our maturity journey is because instead of doing task- based or runbook- based activities, we're doing the art and science of, okay, let's go have a conversation with our stakeholders about these three different whiteboarding apps, and should we only have two? Should we have an in- plus- one strategy? Should we keep all three? Maybe there's a business unit that needs a third, but we can shift where we have seats between those three to probably leverage better commercial terms, and I think that's where we're not there yet. We're working on getting there, but that's where it really comes to, if we can automate all of these steps to getting the data in, then we can unlock additional value for our enterprise and drive better outcomes.

Cory Wheeler: Yeah. Excited to be partnering on that with you directly. One final question. This has been amazing. The time always goes very quickly.

Jason Owens: It always flies, right?

Cory Wheeler: It does. This year's theme for SaaSMe is turning risk into opportunity.

Jason Owens: Sure.

Cory Wheeler: As you look at your time at Netflix and your career as an ITAM leader, how are you looking to transform risk? What are the big risk areas at Netflix that you're looking to transform into your opportunity in 2025 and 2026?

Jason Owens: So from a risk perspective, the thing that keeps me up at night still is that we don't have a holistic vision end to end of all usage and utilization across our applications. We're still very much in that crawl- walk phase when it comes to that. My goal this year to reduce risk and to identify it and bring it, is to expand that list of applications that we have under licensed lifecycle management because every application that we bring in reduces the threat surface overall and not just the spend or the dollar threat surface, but it allows us to have conversations around is this SSO enabled? Is it SSO only? Because we tend to see that a lot that there are applications that may have SSO, but if they still allow individual logins, there's potential data exfil. So really being able to have those conversations and say, " Hey, across this fleet of applications, do we have this standardized footprint of how we're managing them and how we're reducing the long- term cost and the long- term risk exposure?" That's really in a nutshell, that's what software asset management is.

Cory Wheeler: It really is, and that's beginning with the data that informs the strategy. Hopefully everybody today has been able to learn as much from Jason as I have over the years. His ability to paint his vision and to go execute, leveraging internal teams, leveraging his own team, leveraging offshore teams to drive that is truly the best that I've seen in the industry.

Jason Owens: Thank you.

Cory Wheeler: So Jason, thank you so much for joining us here today.

Jason Owens: Thank you.

Cory Wheeler: It's a thrilling always having you join, and I can't wait for our next meeting to talk about automation.

Jason Owens: Awesome. Thanks, Cory.

Cory Wheeler: All right.