A few years ago, Productiv founder and CEO, Jody Shapiro talked me through a plan to build a system of record and workflow for enterprise SaaS management. Companies were struggling with hundreds of SaaS apps and millions in spend but no concept of if or how those apps and that budget were being used, resulting in wasted licenses and a lack of insight into which applications truly drove value. Jody’s approach was category-defining, and Accel was proud to lead the Series A investment. 

Today, I couldn’t be prouder to share, a little less than a year and a half after launching, how Productiv is blazing a new trail in the SaaS Management category with the launch of Productiv Essentials, their free tier. 

Productiv Essentials gives businesses an easy-to-use and no cost foundation to effectively and efficiently manage their SaaS investments, especially as SaaS continues to pervade our work lives. With this foundation, businesses get a single location to constantly improve the way work is done by optimizing the right applications for the right teams with the right spend.

Before 2020, we already knew that the explosion of SaaS had made seeking a data-driven approach to understanding how employees are actually using applications an important need. But almost overnight, SaaS applications went from being a tool we used at work every day to the connective glue that kept businesses running and teams communicating with each other. Measuring the ROI of SaaS and the engagement of employees with their applications is now an enterprise imperative. 

It shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, that SaaS applications are growing exponentially, but IT organizations can’t keep up. A recent survey from Productiv confirms this:

• Organizations typically use more than 100 applications, but 88% of IT leaders have little to no visibility on how those apps are being used.
• 94% of IT leaders agree that manual tracking of SaaS applications leads to out-of-date information and poor decision making
• 78% feel they have complete usage information at renewal time.

With more than 100 applications per business, the current state of poorly maintained spreadsheets just can’t scale. Fortunately for IT leaders, Productiv Essentials provides a no-cost way to start building the central system of record where the C-suite and functional leaders can collaborate on and improve SaaS application strategies. 

Since Day 1, we have been privileged to partner with the Productiv team. Congratulations to Jody, Munish, Ashish, and the rest of the team on your launch, and here’s to ditching the SaaS spreadsheet for good! 

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—Steve