December 5, 2024

VendorHawk Overview

VendorHawk

VendorHawk

What is VendorHawk?

Vendorhawk is an enterprise software chaos management platform for SaaS subscriptions. The platform of the company looks at data from accounts payable and expense systems to see the full list of software applications in a company.

An enterprise can use VendorHawk’s product to keep track of how many cloud software licenses are being used. A centralized view of all SaaS used, their utilization, and license costs are provided by the application. This aids managers in cost planning and subsequent cost optimization for the applications.

In addition, it informs users via email when licenses need to be renewed. It works with SaaS like Salesforce, Box, Docusign, Office365, and Pagerduty.

History of VendorHawk

The private company, VendorHawk, has been in the business for six years. The company focuses on computer software. The place of the President is held by Patrick Lowndes. Seattle, Washington, USA, is the location of its headquarters.

VendorHawk was started by Lowndes and his co-founder Brian Geisler as a side project. They made the decision to devote their entire time to the startup following initial customer interest. They were able to work approximately 20 hours per week on VendorHawk by bootstrapping a modest sum of money while continuing to hold down their day jobs. They joined Techstars after gaining sufficient traction with paying customers, and 9Mile Labs Fund III contributed additional pre-seed capital.

Ben became their third cofounder after them. It was a big win for them to add him as their third co-founder (second developer), and it helped them build much faster. They sorted out before long what they expected to construct, however in a real sense needed more time at the keyboard. Ben’s arrival accelerated their development, enabling them to accelerate the development of their business objectives and roadmap.

They wanted to make a safe, web-based platform that worked directly with major SaaS and finance vendors to let users see usage, licensing, and spending data. In addition, they assist their customers in monitoring their SaaS spending, vendors, and app usage in order to maximize their cloud software investment.

The ability to analyze data from accounts payable and other expense management systems to create a comprehensive software application list is part of VendorHawk’s offering. Through its various third-party integrations, it also makes it possible to monitor usage and upcoming renewals.

Funding

The seed funding for VendorHawk totaled $1.2 million. Techstars Ventures, Social Starts, Telos Ventures, Curious Capital, Alliance of Angels, Darrell Cavens (CEO of Zulily), T.A. McCann (Founder of Gist & Rival IQ), John Case (CEO of Unify Square, former Microsoft Office365 executive), Jon Roskill (CEO of Acumatica, former head of Microsoft Worldwide Channel), Chris Stolte (Co-Founder/CTO of Tableau), and other investors participated in the round.

The funds were intended for the company’s expansion of their customer base and development of more advanced, enterprise-grade features and integrations.

Lowndes intended to use the new funding to expand the number of products that integrate with Vendorhawk’s system and begin taking on more difficult challenges, such as massive enterprise resource planning systems that can be quite complex. Although large businesses could already use Vendorhawk to manage their spending,

How it Works

It was much simpler to keep track of how much money companies were spending on software when they only had a handful of software vendors. Those days will not return; small software vendors can be spread out across departments like marketing and accounting in modern businesses, numbering in the dozens or even hundreds. Although it can get messy, this has been an improvement for the most part, allowing employees to find the best tools for their jobs at a reasonable price.

Everyone has some idea of how much they spend, but it’s only a rough estimate, and that’s really what most people end up with. Numerous businesses attempt to manage this using multiple spreadsheets, which is inefficient. Additionally, some of the more recent pay-as-you-go pricing models utilized by such services were not necessarily intended for contract management systems.

Companies can use Vendorhawk’s product to connect all of their software vendors in a single view. It can also pull data from spreadsheets or other business management software like Okta or NetSuite. One of its main advantages is that it can track software that is paid for but not used. This can encourage businesses to use more software they already have or change the terms of their license when it’s time to renew.

The product is currently being used by ten customers, including Mulesoft and Chef, according to the startup. The pricing is determined by the company’s size. The product incorporates the pricing and renewal schedules of Vendorhawk.

Acquisition

Vendorhawk decided to join ServiceNow and immediately have the scale that supports both traditional Software Asset Management and also helps customers with a broader set of vendor and asset management functions like hardware, contracts, and procurement after carefully considering how to build towards its broader goals of reaching beyond just SaaS Vendor Management.

In 2018, ServiceNow announced that it had agreed to buy VendorHawk, a leader in software as a service management based in Seattle, for all cash. ServiceNow is quickly expanding its software asset management capabilities with VendorHawk to assist customers in driving digital transformation by providing transparency into software license utilization and costs.

In order to rapidly accelerate and broaden its support for SaaS Subscription Management, Servicenow collaborated with VendorHawk. ServiceNow hopes to become the market leader in offering a comprehensive software asset management solution that combines on-premises software and SaaS subscription management on a single platform with this acquisition.

At the time of acquisition, VendorHawk had seven employees and had received $1.2 million in funding. VendorHawk had expansive help for more than 36,000 SaaS applications to find, spend and plan excess applications. It also analyzed and optimized SaaS subscriptions for leading applications like Salesforce, Box, and Google G Suite. Customers could discover, rationalize, and optimize SaaS subscriptions across their organization with the assistance of the VendorHawk cloud solution.

The Future of VendorHawk

SaaS memberships can spread quickly at organizations, frequently bypassing IT. As a result, businesses frequently have difficulty determining which apps are in use and how much money is being spent on them. Many businesses are deploying redundant apps, some of which are automatically renewed annually but are underutilized because they lack full visibility into SaaS usage across the organization.

ServiceNow SAM will provide customers with the capability from a single, powerful platform for customers who require a SAM solution with a robust SaaS subscription management capability to discover all apps in use to manage and optimize redundancy, access, and spend.

The current ServiceNow Software Asset Management offering is enhanced and new capabilities in SaaS spend and vendor management are brought about by the addition of VendorHawk’s extensive knowledge of managing SaaS usage and redundancy.

VendorHawk was planned to be included in a ServiceNow Software Asset Management released in 2019 and added to the Now Platform.

In order to better meet the requirements of its clients, ServiceNow appears to be continuously improving its IT operations management. They promise value over time by integrating workflows and creatively automating them. It is regarded as one of the best ERP systems on the market by some in the sector. Its acquisition of VendorHawk demonstrates its dedication to the SaaS subscription model and its benefits. ServiceNow’s software asset management (SAM) solutions complement this. Customers generally give the platform high marks, but many people think the price is high.

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