Productiv Launches Elastic License Management (ELM) to Help Companies Increase Operational Velocity

Productiv announced its SaaS Intelligence platform now helps companies automate manual processes for license deprovisioning and license tier downgrades. The new Productiv add-on, Elastic License Management (ELM), helps companies like Databricks reduce IT overhead and better manage app spend by simplifying license management. Databricks’ IT staff saved thousands of hours formerly spent on inefficient manual and scripted processes by utilizing Productiv’s solution to track real-time app and feature usage and to schedule automated provisioning processes using this data. Databricks grew from 600 to 3,000 employees in a few years, yet the company successfully optimized spend on its collaboration and video conference platform by moving employees not using advanced features from the paid version to the free version, reclaiming 35% of the higher tier licenses for assignment to new employees.

Most companies have over 250 SaaS applications, with large enterprises averaging more than 350 apps. License management for these large portfolios places a heavy demand on IT and its operations. Companies can spend 2,000-4,000 hours annually — or more — manually collecting data from each app and then removing or changing licenses assigned to employees. The number of license events can reach into the millions.

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Databricks Uses Productiv to Optimize SaaS App Portfolio

Before the Covid pandemic, Databricks managed their portfolio of more than 300 SaaS apps in a spreadsheet. “It was straight spreadsheets and exporting logs from, for instance, Office 365 and Okta. It was very cumbersome and time consuming,” said Ian Kennedy, Director Corporate Engineering Helpdesk at Databricks. “We would find that we were still being charged for people who hadn’t been here for a while.”

Today, Databricks uses Productiv’s SaaS Intelligence platform and ELM capability to drive IT operations and optimize application spend. Recently the company used data-driven insights from Productiv to determine which employees were not using paid features for a video conferencing service, and moved those employees to the free version. Formerly at Databricks, deprovisioning was done as time permitted, in batches by app through manual license reclamation and custom coding. But using Productiv, deprovisioning of all apps now automatically occurs on an employee’s departure day, reducing compliance risks.

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