SaaS has matured dramatically over the last 5–10 years, to the point where teams are directly adopting the software they need to do their jobs without any oversight. The sheer number of high quality products solving all sorts of business needs has driven the fast rise of SaaS. In fact, our own data across 500+ customers shows this is dominating across all business functions. proliferation in SaaS This explosion in SaaS adoption can introduce new challenges to business. These are important issues and questions that affect the entire organization, including: : Is the new vendor that marketing chose SOC 2 compliant? Which vendors have access to sensitive information? Are our employes following basic account security best-practices? Security & compliance : Who’s reviewing the SaaS spending on a regular basis, now that it’s a significant line item in the P&L? Budgeting : How do you evaluate and compare vendors, or manage the renewal process? Vendor management : How do you make sure new employees have access to the apps they need to be productive? Or that former employees don’t have access? People operations and workflows In the past, the IT team typically addressed these challenges, but now the picture looks a lot more informal — chaotic, even. In many cases, finance is left to discover unchecked spending issues, while engineering teams are on the front-lines of security and compliance challenges that can put the organization’s reputation and business on the line. Meanwhile, people ops teams are left with onboarding and offboarding employees onto the right technology. SaaS has made IT everyone’s job, but much of that job today is purely reactive. If organizations aren’t feeling the pain of SaaS chaos now, they will be soon. Solving for SaaS chaos requires a collaborative effort, rather than a single person, team, or point solution. Organizations need to engage with IT and Security, Finance, HR, team leaders, executives, and more. We created to give these teams real-time visibility into SaaS app usage and spending, serving a single source of record for across the entire organization. Eric Paley at Founder Collective, whom Aaron White and I have had the pleasure of working with for two companies, likes to say that we’re “creating the operating system for IT teams of the future.” Blissfully SaaS management Since launching out of private beta last fall, we’ve now worked with over 500 customers to solve pain points across their organizations. And we’re excited to keep building. To continue investing towards our vision of blissful SaaS management, we’re announcing a $3.5M seed round, led by Hummer Winblad Venture Partners (HWVP), and joined by HubSpot, Founder Collective, and a collection of great angel investors. Mitchell Kertzman, an experienced operator and General Partner at HWVP who led the round and is joining our board, said, “We think having the right platform to manage the proliferation of SaaS apps and vendors is the foundation for today’s modern IT, and we’re excited to back Blissfully to tackle that vision.” This funding will accelerate our vision of powering a new model of IT management, purpose-built for the SaaS world — helping us make continued investments in our product, growth, and team. HubSpot, a Blissfully investor and SaaS leader serving over 40,000 small and mid-market companies has seen the industry’s rocketship growth first-hand. CEO Brian Halligan added: “The widespread growth of SaaS across companies of all sizes is a leading indicator of the market need for Blissfully. We believe the Blissfully team can solve the problem of SaaS chaos, giving businesses critical insights into their application stack.” SaaS has changed the way teams work for the better. Now, the approach to IT management has to evolve along with the way people work today. Blissfully’s ultimate goal is to give companies a new level of visibility, helping them get a handle on SaaS chaos and make smarter, more informed decisions. You can learn more and sign up for free at Blissfully.com. Originally published at www.blissfully.com on August 9, 2018.
