ServiceNow is acquiring VendorHawk. We asked Farrell Hough, our general manager of ITSM, ITBM and ITAM, for her insight to the significance of the deal.

1. Why is ServiceNow buying VendorHawk?

We joined forces with VendorHawk to rapidly accelerate and expand our support for SaaS Subscription Management. With this acquisition, ServiceNow expects to become a market leader in providing a comprehensive software asset management (SAM) solution to manage both on-premises software and SaaS subscriptions on a single platform.

Today, our powerful Software Asset Management solution provides visibility into software assets across the enterprise throughout their full life cycle.  ServiceNow SAM encompasses the management of software both on-premises and in the cloud.  SaaS is growing rapidly and will soon represent the lion’s share of an enterprise’s software portfolio — 73% of organizations saying nearly all their apps will be SaaS by 2020.

By adding VendorHawk’s complementary and more extensive capabilities to our Now platform, ServiceNow SAM is accelerating and expanding its support for SaaS solutions. With the rise of SaaS, this is a valuable and essential capability for our customers.

2. What are some of VendorHawk’s capabilities?

Today, VendorHawk recognizes 36,000+ SaaS apps to discover spend and map redundant apps. To give you an idea of the scope of the challenge our customers face, at one site VendorHawk identified 248 SaaS apps that the customer was not aware of.

VendorHawk also analyzes utilization and optimizes SaaS subscriptions for contract renewal for many popular apps such as Salesforce, Box, and Google G-Suite to name a few. To date, ServiceNow SAM supports SaaS capabilities for Microsoft Office 365 in our Kingston release with others planned for this year. ServiceNow intends to replatform VendorHawk capabilities into a SAM release in 2019.

3. Why is it important to know how SaaS subscriptions are managed across the business?

SaaS subscriptions can sprawl rapidly at companies, often bypassing IT.  As a result, companies are often unable to identify which apps exist and how much is being spent on them.  Without full visibility into SaaS usage across the company, many are deploying redundant apps some of which are automatically renewed annually, but underutilized.

With the proliferation of SaaS, additional issues arise such as security access risks and granting employees unauthorized access to data circumventing Sarbanes-Oxley controls.  IT teams cannot manage SaaS users and apps they are not aware of.  As a result, current employees with unauthorized data access may go unchecked.  Likewise, former employees who leave a company may still have access to confidential data.

Customers need a SAM solution with a strong SaaS subscription management capability to discover all apps in use to manage and optimize redundancy, access and spend.  ServiceNow SAM will provide customers that ability from a single, powerful platform.

For more information, see our press release here.