Neroli I want to open it up with just a very high level question what do we mean by SAS license management playing a pivotal role in modern I.T Asset Management where does it fit yeah but they're a great question so let's start by defining what modern I.T means right so Asset Management can fall under various categories you have Hardware assets software assets you will have your Cloud assets that would include the hybrid version as well as the pure SAS so when we refer to this whole discipline of it Asset Management we are looking at an umbrella which covers everything that is Hardware your software as well as your on-prem licenses and including the true SAS applications when it comes to your complete it asset estate the servicenow platform the software Asset Management offering it has the capability that will help you monitor track all your assets which again like I emphasized earlier it includes your Hardware assets you have your software and you have your on-prem version your cloud and also your other Cloud resources so with this the beauty of the product is you don't have to go into different systems or different applications to track what assets you own anymore you just have to come into the platform you'll be able to track everything in one place so that is where the strength of the platform lies helping you capture all your asset estate in one place no that's that's great I mean that really sets it apart right that's what modernizes asset management is the ability to have everything in one single pane of glass centrally monitored and Central centrally point of control where you can take action and make make meaningful decisions for your business so specifically speaking on the SAS side what are we trying to resolve what is What is the value we're giving to customers and what value as a customer am I trying to give to my own business to my business stakeholders yeah so uh Victor on that one as we all know that the SAS sprawl has been skyrocketing especially over the last two three years ever since covet started the work from home situation has been different a lot of collaborations been happening online versus in person so what organizations have noticed is many of their employees have started signing up for let's say SAS applications or tools that they need for their day-to-day functions right and by doing so what they're trying to do is uh they're trying to get quick access to these tools which means they're trying to bypass any kind of manage real approvals that they would need or any kind of I.T approvals right those approvals are thought of as secondary when it comes to just procuring and using those applications over a period of time what organizations have also realized is because of this usage of these SAS applications that have not really been approved purchases by their I.T organization it's caused a lot of security and compliance issues right so that pretty much calls now for a system that will help them manage this entire process and by entire process I mean right from requesting it to getting it approved and helping provisioning their cloud services right so if you look at this SAS license management life cycle within the servicenow platform you have the ability to request for these SAS applications through your service catalog you have the procurement team that can track the workflow of where that request is and help you deploy that application once you're entitled to it and then often time what happens is we will also continue just monitoring your usage right because all these organizations have huge demand for various applications and users have been subscribed to so many applications that it becomes very important to track their actual usage so we will help you monitor what you're using how you're using and if you're not using kind of retiring that subscription or reclaiming it so that we can help you help you actually manage that entire life cycle so SAS license management really think of it as a it's a discipline it's a practice that you put in place using systems or tools where you can one get visibility into what you own so we help you discover the various SAS applications along with the subscriptions so users who have access to those SAS applications next we try to keep a track of what you own in terms of entitlements as well right so right now there are various systems where you might be tapping in making sure how many subscriptions you own keeping a track of it probably in spreadsheets too but now you can get away with that by just entering all that information within service now so now you have visibility into what you own we've pulled in your subscription data what you have actually uh bought in terms of your entitlements and what you're actually using right so that's captured by the usage so that is the entire um I would say the entire SAS life cycle management that we help you track and monitor within service now yeah that's great so you really have the life cycle there the Cradle of the grave of just the software that you have from a SAS perspective my next question though um is a little bit more technical Maybe you know when we talk about software and how it's discovered um there's many ways to discover software is there anything unique to SAS given that it's not physically installed on a device and how does that work in Sam how do we pull in information uh yeah discoverable information yeah so like I mentioned discovering the SAS applications and the subscriptions is one of the key feature or use cases within SAS license management we do it in a couple of ways and I'm going to use terms like direct Integrations or SSO integration or custom integration and just kind of walk you through each of these sections right so what is really your use case with either of these integration method that you use all you're trying to do is get visibility into your subscriptions get access to the last activity when did the user last access that tool or perform an activity and then based on that you can perform some meaningful insights so the first part over here that you see is really the direct Integrations uh ever since our journey with SAS license management we've rolled out some really big logos and all these are vendors typically that are super expensive when it comes to buying subscriptions um so we've tried to tackle those initial applications first so now we have support for almost 35 Plus Integrations um just with direct integration and when I say direct integration what we are really doing is using the vendor apis to pull in that subscription information and the last activity data right so think of this as a direct vendor API integration so we connect to the endpoint and we're able to pull in all the data uh with these Integrations we do release them on the servicenow store so the frequency at which you get them is a lot faster we release these Integrations almost every quarter so you will see a list of like four or five Integrations releasing every three months where you can take advantage of getting that whole use case of uh visibility into your subscriptions and analyzing the usage the next one is the single sign-on um the way the single sign-on providers work is very different right so we've tackled the big ones which is azure ad and OCTA which now gives us access to the organization's application catalog right and when I see a catalog for OCTA and Azure ad you're really looking into like 10 thousands of applications that you can access right so now with the SSO integration you're able to connect to any of the application you want to monitor that your organization has signed up for and then rest of the use case kind of follows the same right where we're able to pull in the users see their usage and help you reclaim so that's the single sign-on method and then the last method is called as the custom integration which is our SAS license connection framework it is a um it is a very low code no code way of helping our customers create their own Integrations right you might say that you have a logo that you do not support or that you want support for which is not there on the slide right now or it does not fall under the SSO category so I really want to connect to that application so as long as that particular vendor has apis for you to use apis to connect and authenticate apis to pull in subscriptions apis to actually look into the last activity you will be able to use this framework to create your own integration and with each of these Integrations we then look into usage which is really really really core strength of how we do it within our platform and I'll talk here in a bit of how we go into the deep level of usage which then eventually ties into your savings but uh Victor to your question this is how we are enabling our customers we have direct Integrations we have single sign-on and then we have this SLC framework which is very flexible as long as you have all the information you're able to connect um to any application of your choice yeah this is great so so I like that there's different angles at which you can start pulling in information from your SAS vendors not least of which you know having direct integration with vendors is perhaps the primary way of getting that information so you talked a little bit about um the different types of usage data that we might get from these Integrations or setups could you talk to us a little bit about that and to what degree of information do we get yes absolutely uh the level of details we get from SSO versus direct often time varies and I say that because with SSO you're really looking at just your last login right so you might have accessed let's say box as an application using SSO so we will just tell you when you accessed box but if you go to a level deeper which is again the vendor last login that again is it's a little better than just saying when you last login but it gives you a breath in the sense you can access when you're last logged in between 30 days 60 days 90 days and you have the capability to Define that but again that is still Associated to the first one where we are just looking at login information right you're not really knowing what the user is doing with that application which brings us to number three which is the most important part that we focus on especially with direct Integrations that's called all the meaningful usage data so what this will tell you is your you've accessed box but with box what activity did you perform right did you upload a file or did you comment on a file did you collaborate so just tracking that level of detail would give you more meaningful Insight so that you're able to gauge how well is the user using that application so overall in our journey of Sam implementation or SAS implementation I highly recommend the customers to make sure first take advantage of the direct Integrations right because that's going to be very accurate it's going to tell you exactly when the user performed what activity and if you don't get that level of detail from your direct integration you can always then rely on the SSO which just tells you when did they user last login so the category one two three often kind of fall under the direct integration or the SSO creation category where you're managing user subscriptions there is another flavor to SAS applications and that is when these applications have a consumption um kind of model of Licensing right so when I say consumption that means how many units are you consuming it could be how many gigabytes of storage have you consumed or how many envelopes are you consuming for DocuSign or how many contacts for Salesforce marketing Cloud are you consuming so it then tells you how many units of a particular thing are you consuming again this does not apply to all the SAS applications but where it applies for the ones we've built we also help you track that right so now we are able to see how many you own what are you using and how fast are you going to consume the quota that was allocated to you so that falls under consumption analysis and then the last one I spoke about is the customized usage that kind of ties into the SLC framework where you are you have the ability to Define what that usage is that you want to track right so it really ties into those custom Integrations that you are creating so again just looking at this chart you can see that most of the vendors or applications have support for one and two the third one is really very Niche to all these direct vendors that we have support for which again is the most accurate data that we would rely on so given a combination of user subscription and consumption that's how we will help you track your usage Within servicenow yeah that's great I mean I can see customers looking at this and saying okay if I were to plan out and scale some of my my workloads maybe I might focus on just those products where I'm looking at active and inactive users and as I Advance my use case or I Advance my my journey with SAS I might look in more in depth and make some more decisions based on how my users are are using the data or using the software right so I know that there's there's vendors out there that might have different flavors of Licensing depending on the complexity of their activities and that's where I see three four and five kind of being valuable inputs to their decision making so I I thanks for kind of distinguishing that for us I think that's really helpful yes absolutely so now I want to jump into another segment um narali I want to talk about roles and responsibilities so you know you might have the same type of roles and stakeholders involved in on-prem as you do in SAS but there might be some other members from a SAS perspective that are different so could you talk to us about who are the folks that are involved in planning for this type of work yeah and that's a great question you bring up because all this that I was explaining up until now what is SAS license management what we can do how we can do excuse me entails different personas right um so this is not just limited to a user who's going to help you set up these integration it starts a level up um just to have this discipline in place just to have this program approved or even the buy-in we always start with the executive sponsors right because we need Your sponsorship to make sure that we're going to help the organization realize value uh once we have integrated with various applications and servicenow software Asset Management has been fully implemented into their system so executive buy-in executive sponsorship is one of our top roles that do not actively feed into SAS license management day-to-day activity but the entire Journey would start with them then you have roles like system admin business owners so system admins are pretty much uh users that will help you integrate with different applications right to integrate with different applications you need to know how you can authenticate uh you need to know what the credentials are you need to know what the portal access looks like so they're the ones who have those contacts or they have that information that will help you establish the connection and then the business owner is nothing but somebody who will help you kind of manage uh the purchase or even monitor uh what you've bought right so they are like a procurement team but they are very specific to like a business unit or certain applications that they're purely focused on and then of course you have the procurement team that's kind of taking in charge of the entire contract contract renewals when are they coming up so things like that are often captured by the procurement team uh for other stakeholders you have like the security vulnerability ones the risk management ones they are the users who are exposed to any kind of SAS vulnerabilities right so if there is a software it's vulnerable to something they keep a track of that there is a database so you want to you want to know them you want to know what those vulnerabilities are because next thing what you're going to do is Mark that software or that particular SAS application as a restricted offer right so just being in uh just be collaborating with with them will kind of help you manage other use cases outside of just purely managing visibility into your subscriptions or getting access to it and seeing the usage so a lot more people collaborate in this entire journey of SAS license management uh besides again like the ones who will help you do the setup right so that's where we kind of start the journey with the executive team work the way through involving people who will actually help in day-to-day stuff and then the end goal is once you have that meaningful insights you're again presenting your finding back to the executive so it's like a complete circle involves a lot more people uh and that's how you're able to successfully get full advantage of this uh program yeah yeah and it's not a it's not a one-time thing right I mean you'll you'll meet with these folks on a regular basis you might have an initial meeting or you talk about your original goals what you're trying to achieve and what I've seen successful customers do is they'll have quarterly business reviews where they might reconvene look at how the progress is going make any adjustments as needed and like you said earlier some folks might just be involved at the initial stages like the SAS admin who will help set up all the configuration and give access so that Sam can start pulling in data but then there are other folks that'll be there for the Long Haul right the executives that'll get reports back how things are progressing the SAS business owner who might look at how the usage compares to how they originally purchased the product so there's a lot of a lot of folks in there and like you said it's not a one-time thing it's a cyclical thing and it's good to have that as part of your practice and overall governance structure yeah and you bring up a good point too I know you briefly kind of touched upon goals and I would like to even Deep dive a little more into goal setting and how the executive team and other team members help you establish the goals right um because when you kick start this journey it's it's important for you to know what your goals are what you're trying to achieve versus just saying I want to connect to all my Integrations and I then want to get visibility into my subscriptions right that's now like a big goal that you have so I highly recommend like when it comes to goal setting for SAS license management my recommendation to customers has always been use goals that are very uh specific to you in the sense you're able to quantify it versus having some that are aggressive right because if you look at the nature of all these SAS applications it is complex even though we make it sound easy like it's just connecting to direct integration but each application is different in the sense what they track how they track what kind of data comes in so you want to make sure that your goals are very very specific so just to walk you through some examples and these are examples that are um I've kind of had when I've helped the customer bring up to speed with the SAS license management offering right one would be where I would say I want to spend I want to manage all my suspense again like I mentioned earlier it's aggressive you would definitely need help to Define what those applications are what does your spend look like versus I have the customer redefine that goal and say okay I'm first going to track Salesforce across two of my largest organizations in the next two months and why is that a powerful goal is because now the customer is shortlisted Salesforce which happens to be their most expensive application to his identified the two largest organizations that contribute to that spend and now he has a timeline right that he wants to achieve this in the next two months so it's very important to have these goals because it's going to help you track the progress that you make along once the implementation has been done the second one is uh one classic example I've heard of unrealistics I would say goal was I want to reduce my spend by 30 percent now what does that even mean right like you want to identify which of your subscriptions are the most expensive one just sticking to the Salesforce example within Salesforce 2 we know that there are so many products that contribute to the Salesforce licensing which is the one that contributes to your majority of the spend right so that would be let's say permission set licenses in this case so then we help the customer just to primarily focus on their permission settle licenses we help them set up their Salesforce integration we pull in the permission set they entered in their entitlements and they were able to see the value out of that so again just being focused on a certain set of licenses within Salesforce versus just attacking Salesforce as a big integration altogether that right and then you have somewhere they're like okay we want to just um reclaim all the state licenses you want to you want to First understand how you want to reclaim right so you want to just make sure that after you do Salesforce you're then going to tackle the next top um vendor or application based on spend and then you might expand into more I would say mature capability or features that like spend detection so just trying to sequence out your implementation also goes a long way so just having your goals very structured meaningful to your organization and keep them time bound right because that will help you measure uh progress that you make along yeah yeah definitely I think one of the things that stood out to me there was that uh you know even if you pick one vendor that you're after in this case you said it was a sales force even at that point you're still not done with specifying what is it that you want to do right each vendor might have different licensing terms or different user license that dictates how customers will be using the product and you might have many organizations in your business unit that are using the product and so being able to just not just say the vendor but go one step further and say this specific title for this specific organization I think is a really clear way of keeping things focused and organized and when you take those successes from that initial scope you can expand and be more successful overall without getting into too much trouble along the way that makes a lot of sense absolutely and you kind of nailed it and summarized it very well let's talk a little bit about um how I should do this as as a customer I've found the right folks I've identified the right product that I want to do this integration for or the SSO what have you how to actually get sassy with the tool how do I use it yes yes um so again like I I cannot emphasize enough having a structured plan often goes a long way right which means uh now you know the roles and people involved and what it takes to successfully implement the program so oftentimes I think the structure that's really worked well for my customers is giving them this this kind of a idea to jump start their program right you have a kickoff uh meeting where you have the executive sponsorship you have all the team members who are going to be involved you probably might need some system admins of all the different Integrations you are going to eventually connect to then you would determine the list of SAS Integrations right if your organization has let's say hundreds of applications which one do you want to tackle first so just having a structured list of that as well really helps the way I have tried to help my customers prioritize is look at their spend once they give me a list of applications I would just look at the spend tackle the most expensive ones first because likelihood of you having more number of subscriptions and realizing more savings from that is going to be high so definitely kind of prioritizing your SAS Integrations will go a long way and then you want to make sure that there is a timeline right like in my goal example that I gave earlier you they measured it within two months because you want to make sure you're marching towards a timeline just having a open-end project plan with no timelines to track is not going to help you so definitely have some timelines and then March towards it once you've done all that in the kickoff I think rest of it is really have you plan it how you implement analyze and report right so when it comes to planning each of the Integrations that you've shortlisted right you want to make sure that you go through the instruction guides that we provide uh we have worksheets available to you we have documentation or even playbooks for some of our Integrations you just want to make sure that you're able to kind of go step by step to successfully be able to connect to those in Integrations right so you've prepared your service now instance and now we are preparing for connecting to these different SAS Integrations once you've set up the Integrations next thing you want to do is enter your procurement data right because that would be a logical step I have discovered uh through the integration setup I've been able to discover what subscriptions I have but now you want to enter how many entitlements you have so that is where you start implementing your contract data or your procurement data into the system and then you would reconcile so once you reconcile that data you're going to analyze the results which are in form of either reports that you can see or dashboards because dashboards really roll up roll up all the data that you need to analyze right so that's where you start analyzing the dashboard you look at what recommendations we have for potential savings do you want to really reclaim subscriptions that were not being used or do you want to notify the user so taking action against that that would be very important in your analyze phase and then everything circles back to going back to your leadership and telling them hey this is what we found this is what the dashboard looks like this is your overall span this is what my savings look like so you're able to provide in-depth meaningful insights right from that dashboard back to your executive leadership right and you would then do this with every integration once you've set up the integration once that's all you need because the rest of the process is then automated for the Integrations that you've already set up and when I say automated basically you would have scheduled jobs that run at a certain time and they would just kick off when the schedule kicks in so you don't have to worry about setting up the integration all over again so that's why I would highly again uh stress on the need of following the instructions and making sure you go step by step to successfully connect to these integrate operations yeah yeah so I think The Upfront investment allows you to then continuously operationalize and report on how your SAS usage is is uh is carrying out in your organization you made one quick comment about implementation uh I think it's worth noting setting up the Integrations first before inputting the entitlements this is something that's fairly nuanced but it's it's pretty important because when you look at this from an on-premise standpoint we recommend customers to create the entitlements first and then set up the installation so just bear that in mind that from a SAS perspective it's setting up the integration first and then the entitlement information I think you have a much cleaner implementation experience doing it that way at narali you also talked about the dashboard view so can you show that to us what does the end result look like if I were a customer I have set this up with my team I'm now getting results and I want to carry it back to my executive sponsor and show the good work that we've done yes absolutely I'm gonna still screenshot from you yes that's fine all right let me know if you can see my screen right here we do yes thank you perfect so this is within our sulfur asset workspace again this is we are moving towards the next gen UI so if you're familiar with our releases uh starting Rome you will see this new modern user experience and within that one of the dashboards we have is going to be focused on the SAS overview dashboard so the way you would just navigate is we have asset and analytics and then we have the various dashboards over here um the SAS overview dashboard again what it's going to do is it's going to combine information related to your user subscriptions as well as the consumption licensing models that I talked earlier and it kind of combines all that real into this one dashboard so the top part is really focused everything is around user subscriptions right here and then the bottom part is where you have your consumption related data and then over here I think what I really like about this dashboard is I don't need to go into any of the views or I don't need to drill down into any other reports because all my top key uh kpis that my leadership would really care about are right here right so then you can pretty much just walk them through this dashboard and also within the dashboard you have the ability to drill down so that will tell you what data actually makes up um to the numbers that you see over here so this is all in all a very very comprehensive dashboard again highlighting all the key kpis that you would want to report on also I understand that there would be thousands of applications probably you're working with or I would say more than 50 applications you've connected and you really care only about one application right maybe Salesforce and then you really want to just focus on Salesforce so in that uh to enable to do that in order to be able to do that you have the ability to even set your own filters right so if you're just focused on Salesforce you're going to select the publisher as Salesforce and that way it can guide you through the data gets refreshed uh just for Salesforce and then you're able to just present those findings so it gives you that flexibility to slice and dice the data the way you want it yeah that's great because sometimes you might be speaking to a business owner as well as the executive on Salesforce right and you want to just show the reporting based on that or you want to talk to the business owner about box and you just want to show that that level of detail and then if you want to have that comprehensive view to just speak with your management then you can do that right so that that allows you to have the right conversations and the meaningful conversations with the folks and personas that are most interested in that particular vendor thanks for sharing that neurology appreciate that yes absolutely so a natural progression from SAS license management uh would be spend detection so do you mind telling us a little bit more about spend detection and where that fits into the overall SAS play sure uh yeah so as you've kind of pointed out it's like a bonus feature I would say so spend detection is a feature that comes with your existing software Asset Management professional SKU no additional entitlements or licensing is required to use this feature this feature is however different so up until you were pulling in your SAS Integrations you were really focused around user subscriptions right and then you're entering your entitlement so that is all related to the pure SAS world now there is a part of the SAS band that is unknown or it's not managed and how are we able to discover that unmanaged spend is through software spend detection so with this feature you're able to import your financial transactions it could be from your financial systems or gen Ledger we give you a template out of the box and we really don't need a whole set of data they're like five six attributes we really want so that we can help you kind of normalize that data and help you analyze those transactions so you would just import that template into our system and then using machine learning we've built models that will analyze those transactions right and based on that we will be able to determine whether the cost that you had was on a real software use or that was not something that was approved by the organization right so that way you're able to then detect what your Shadow it spend looks like using spend transactions the other thing that we will do with this data is give you a view into your overlapping software right so you could be using multiple tools for doing let's say collaboration or or communication or hosting a meeting that is where we will analyze and tell you for instance you have zoom and you have um let's say Microsoft teams and you're using the same uh you're using two different tools to do the same thing which is host meetings so we want to bring that visibility to your attention because what we really want you to analyze is do you really need two tools or can one tool suffice right in that case you might then want to create a project task for your it admin to take a look at so come next renewal they know that they just want to renew maybe the zoom subscription and they don't need Microsoft teams so making those meaningful uh decisions is going to be possible using this feature so you're getting insights into what your unknown software spend looks like using the financial transaction as well as you're able to gauge uh how you can reduce the use of tools that are probably doing the same thing so this feature is unique in the sense we are actually collaborating or integrating with another product over here which is the SPM product it was formerly the it business management product so with that what we are trying to do is help you create demands right so the example that I gave you where you have zoom and Microsoft teams you want to let's say deprecate one of them you will be able to create a demand using this product feature and then you will be able to initiate that whole task for the it admin to retire one so that is where spend detection is a little unique in the sense it stands a little different from your normal SAS license management but once you've kind of matured your journey through SAS license management the next logical step would be to look into spend detection so that way you can now take cake like you will have the full view of what your user subscriptions look like but also at the same time you've analyzed your spend yeah yeah that's great so you can be very intentional about this right so you you know what SAS vendors you might have already in in your environment and so that that's what you use for direct integration SSO or some custom Integrations but then you might want to say hey is there something out there I don't know and that's where kind of spend detection falls into place nirali is spend detection an additional charge to customers or is it something that's embedded with their existing uh subscription yes it will be included with your Sam Pros queue there is just a legal agreement um uh kind of documentation or mandum that you need to sign prior to using it's just because you're importing the financial transactions into the system but as far as licensing is concerned you will be able to take advantage of this using the same Sam parole skew okay okay got it so so no charge but you have to sign an amendment and probably if you don't have that already you know speak with your your servicenow representative and they'll help with that uh the last thing I'll say before we move to the next slide is the information that is coming in from the financial transaction perspective it's not every single piece of data that we're using right we're only using a certain amount of categories or data fields that we use for our Predictive Analytics I just want to set that set that record straight that's that's correct is that right yes that's right right there okay awesome so what are what are some takeaways that we can get from from this session here how do we get quick time to Value if I was a customer yes so the quickest path to Sam value and again this has been tried and tested with our customers as well is first you want to start with SAS right what happens by reducing your SAS spend one connecting to these Integrations is a lot easier than trying to go the on-prem route or doing discovery of anything else so with the SAS uh SAS license management you're able to now get visibility into all these subscriptions you're able to gauge usage you're able to reclaim as well so the fastest time to value is start your journey with SAS and also a lot of spend by organizations most of their I.T budget kind of contributes more towards a SAS spend especially we've seen that Trend in the last two three years where more of the on-prem world is now moving to the cloud right so can't uh emphasize enough but start with your SAS Journey the second part then once you've progressed from the SAS I would say explore the spend detection right take on the spend detection part and also take advantage of cloud insights which is another product offering that we have where you can optimize your Cloud resource plan right so take a look into that and once you've explored that as well you move on to the third part which is going to be install driven right so this is where you have your on-prem licenses and this is where you would want to make sure that you have your Discovery set up you're able to discover the installs um you have the entitlement information entered correctly so this journey will definitely make sure that you are set on a path to succeed right because you're starting with something that's going to get you fastest value and then you move on to the more I would say complex ones at the same time which can probably take time maybe in configuration or whatnot so you want to just make sure that you are starting with SAS and then you move on as guided and then when you tie this up with the plan that we walked through the kickoff plan and the journey approach that you would take you're definitely on the path to success yeah no that's great I mean this is at a high level this is very similar to what you were saying um from a goal setting perspective right be specific be intentional start with something small and then eventually grow and expand because as you do that you get expertise you get experience you know how to tackle certain situations and you'll be more successful on your journey while at the same time reporting back to your executive sponsorship all the different wins you're getting along the way I think that's that's great thanks for that narali