Flexera updates its IT management platform to help customers control Salesforce costs | ZDNet

The IT management business Flexera is updating Flexera One, a service that offers IT visibility and cloud cost optimization so that customers can get a hold of some of their biggest SaaS expenses. Specifically, the product now offers visibility into and management of other services like Salesforce AppExchange and Salesforce Marketing Cloud. 

Flexera worked closely with its customers to identify “areas of major spending that can be reduced,” Cyndi Tackett, Flexera’s VP of product marketing, said in a statement. That led to the new functionality around the two Salesforce products. 

In Flexera’s 2022 Tech Spend Pulse survey, 48% of enterprises list Salesforce as one of their top three vendors in terms of IT spending. A number of Salesforce customers have at least 20 instances. The updated Flexera tool gives customers a consolidated view of all their licenses. 

The costs associated with the Salesforce AppExchange can be particularly hard to track since contracts are between enterprises and third-party vendors — not Salesforce. Flexera SaaS Management provides visibility into AppExchange to help customers manage active and inactive users. 

As for Salesforce Marketing, Flexera One will be able to manage data from that cloud beginning after the next Salesforce Marketing Cloud release, expected in Q1 of this year.

The 2022 Tech Spend Pulse survey suggests organizations may be a little overwhelmed by overall SaaS costs at the moment. It found that 69% of respondents increased SaaS usage during the COVID-19 pandemic, and 78% expected to increase that spending in 2022. Yet nearly one third, 33%, are just beginning to manage that spend; an additional 8%  have no processes at all for SaaS spend management.