Technology Intelligence Is Essential for the Future of IT
The last three years have certainly been a whirlwind for us all, resulting in even greater focus on both operational efficiency and resilience. Every company I speak with is trying to strike the balance between ensuring stability while still driving growth. Not to mention trying to sort out their position around the impact of generative AI such as ChatGPT – and how their business should react to this opportunity and potential added security challenge.
This is a time where a new level of cost optimization, risk management and value delivery are essential, a time that calls for a new approach to managing IT.
Addressing a Changing Landscape
Over the past five to ten years, there has been a considerable shift in the way people consume technology. End users became owners of their department-level budgets and technology decisions. SaaS and cloud overtook on-premises software and hardware adoption. While CIOs and IT teams remained accountable for managing overall costs and risk, they often had limited or minimal insight into exactly what was in use at their organization.
At Snow, we understood this behavior wasn’t a passing trend – it was a fundamentally new way of working. And organizations were only going to experience more complexity and uncertainty as a result.
To meet customer needs for years ahead, Snow decided to leverage its leadership and heritage in IT asset management (ITAM) to deliver expanded value in the industry, acknowledging the areas of convergence with SaaS and cloud.
This required a two-pronged approach: both a product and company transformation. We needed to move with speed, scale and rapid innovation. Creating a strong operational foundation was essential to providing a technology solution that could address the myriad of issues in front of our customers.
Enter Technology Intelligence.
Solving the Enterprise IT Visibility Gap
Snow was founded to help organizations better understand and manage the software they had. Over the last five years, we have put Snow on course to manage all aspects of technology.
Our decision to do so reflects the challenges now facing CIOs and IT teams (and their business partners), and the lack of an out of the box solution to manage IT.
Organizations have an inherently fragmented and siloed tech stack. This creates challenges when maintaining visibility and gathering the data needed to make timely and fact-based decisions around cost, risk, security and growth.
And while visibility is the building block on which all these challenges can be addressed, it is a fundamental capability that most organizations lack.
Gaining this visibility is difficult. Most point-based tools provide depth but not breadth (and often, lack integration). Most platforms provide breadth but lack depth. And many organizations are working with a patchwork of technologies that cannot all speak to each other and are managed independently of one another. Attempting to gain visibility under these circumstances is often a losing battle for many organizations.
Enterprises are teetering on the verge of a crisis fueled by this visibility gap and an onslaught of new technologies introduced across the business.
The visibility gap leaves organizations exposed. Vendors can take advantage by constantly changing their licensing terms. SaaS applications thrive on unconstrained use permeating across their environment. And others like cybercriminals or even competitors could easily exploit these weaknesses.
We are helping companies address these problems, providing customers with the ability to better defend themselves, build further resilience and leverage new opportunities.
That’s why we have embraced what we call Technology Intelligence.
Technology Intelligence is the ability to understand and manage all technology.
All data in an enterprise sits in technology assets. However, that data is spread across siloed point tools, meaning that there isn’t a way to harness the true power of this data. Technology Intelligence breaks down these silos and delivers a foundation of comprehensive visibility across the entire IT landscape. With insights and recommendations, the ability to take action to address the biggest areas of need is possible.
At Snow, we believe there is further opportunity in Technology Intelligence beyond addressing the complex challenges of the day. Technology Intelligence, when fully realized, can impact other services that rely on technology asset data to operate efficiently.
We hear about these pain points constantly. Customers cannot get what they need out of their IT service management platform without accurate data fed into the CMDB. IT financial management tools cannot surface informative insights to impact IT financial decisions without comprehensive usage data. Fortifying security posture across an enterprise is fraught if you don’t have complete visibility and an understanding of usage across all layers of your technology landscape.
Our perspective is that Technology Intelligence will open doors for organizations. It allows businesses to really unlock the promised value of their technology investments.
This insight is mission critical. It’s not about having a single source of truth. It’s about having a way to bring together the many truths offered by your technologies – creating an intelligence layer that can act as an insights hub between your technologies to surface both the high-level and granular detail that enables decision making to deliver positive business outcome.
Having the ability to present all your technology data on a cloud-native platform – one that is easily accessible, always updated and can be shared with many stakeholders – is powerful.
And that’s why we built Snow Atlas.
A Holistic Solution Is Now a Critical Need
Based on the complexity and urgency of the issue, we fundamentally believe that the challenges of today cannot be addressed by technology designed for the era of assets not services, or solutions that solve previously siloed parts of the problem. A unified platform is required to not only address the convergence of ITAM, SaaS management and cloud management but to solve the broader set of challenges facing IT teams and business executives alike.
We also see that with the ongoing shifts in the sector from major cloud releases (ongoing deployments from AWS or Google Cloud, for example) to new regulations (such as sustainability reporting mandates for US public companies) to the ongoing generative AI revolution (from ChatGPT to Google Bard) bolsters the need for Technology Intelligence. And it reinforces our view that a platform able to sustain and thrive under continuous innovation is required.
For us, that platform is Snow Atlas.
While we made Snow Atlas generally available in July 2022, culminating years of work, we’ve rapidly started releasing new innovations specifically designed to address some of the biggest challenges organizations are facing today, especially in such a turbulent economy. We are now at a point where we’re releasing new innovations more than once a day.
You can see this in our new and improved Snow SaaS Management solution, for example, where we’ve rearchitected our product as a standalone solution delivered on Snow Atlas. As organizations attempt to grapple with their amorphous SaaS application use, visibility across the tech stack is no longer a nice to have – it’s essential. That’s why we provide the most comprehensive SaaS application discovery available and the ability to track verified usage data with precision.
And this is only the beginning.
We have many more capabilities and new products coming on Snow Atlas.
This includes work from the recent introduction of Snow Labs, our new research and development arm, where we – in partnership with our customers – formally trial new use cases and identify next-generation technologies that might impact IT leaders, quickly pivoting these solutions into products.
Organizations need a better path forward. Snow Atlas – and our work to establish the intelligence layer for all technology – will provide CIOs and IT leaders with the critical insights required to support operational, fiscal and risk-based initiatives. Initiatives that ultimately impact the direction, agility and growth of a business.
This is the power of Technology Intelligence.
This is the power of Snow. And more is yet to come!