What’s New at Snow Software: March 2023
At Snow, we love to talk with our customers. We learn how they use our products and what they need to solve their business and technical challenges. Those learnings get built into our goal of continuous innovation. Read on for this month’s slate of recent product advances.
Launch of Snow SaaS Management
This week, we announced the launch of Snow SaaS Management, our new SaaS management product on Snow Atlas. As SaaS expenditures continue to accelerate and decentralize, so do the costs and risks associated with shadow SaaS. We’ve added loads of new features to enhance our market-leading SaaS discovery and shorten time-to-value so customers can confidently manage their SaaS portfolios.
Customers can begin to secure and optimize SaaS environments more quickly than ever with enhanced visibility into known, unknown, paid and free apps. New capabilities include:
- SSO discovery – Connect to your SSO platform to pull data on SaaS logins. Quickly identify under-utilized apps and opportunities to eliminate waste. Compare this data with apps discovered from additional sources, such as our browser extension, to identify applications that should be accessed via SSO but aren’t.
- Expanded optimization – We’ve broadened our optimization capabilities from 8,000+ to over 23,000 SaaS applications, so you can save money across your entire SaaS portfolio.
- Faster setup – Our streamlined onboarding process allows even non-technical customers to set up connectors in minutes and immediately identify opportunities to save.
- User-centric view – See all applications and subscriptions associated with each user. Drill down into verified usage activity to identify apps adding value vs. those contributing to waste.
Snow SaaS Management can be used alongside our award-winning software asset management (SAM) solution or as a standalone product. It is currently in early access with general availability scheduled for this summer. Take a deeper dive into Snow SaaS Management and start a free trial to try it for yourself.
Application lifecycle management: software store and license reharvesting
Snow Productivity Optimizer, Snow’s SAM automation solution, provides new benefits for application lifecycle management, automation roles and processes, and a modernized look and feel:
- Request tags offer faster, more effective administration by allowing you to tag and filter your requests more granularly.
- Proactive service descriptions provide information transparency, leading to better governance and time/cost savings.
- Scheduled tasks enhancements give you more control and increase automation even more.
With all the above in place, Snow has delivered an automation refresh from the ground up.
Understand more about how Snow provides you with improved automated software governance and spend optimization within your guardrail boundaries in this new video.
Cloud financial management
Snow Cloud Cost is a FinOps-certified platform that enables visibility, monitoring, collaboration and cost optimization for the public cloud. Recent improvements enhance Kubernetes asset insights and enable managed service providers to share dashboards with their customers.
Kubernetes asset costs
As cloud adoption continues to grow, so does the demand for monitoring the costs of Kubernetes infrastructure.
Dashboards now provide an enhanced view of Kubernetes cluster costs by assets such as compute, data transfer and storage. They’re used to identify spend drivers over time and to allocate costs.
Partner support for customer cloud cost optimization
Managed service providers can take the lead on cloud cost optimization by sharing a dashboard with their customers. Dashboards can provide a quick but thorough overview to help customers track spending and unit economics that have an impact on the bottom line.
Improved site navigation and experience
A seemingly small change with a potentially large benefit is coming soon to Snow Atlas customers. We have moved the navigation from the top bar to the left-hand side. User experience research and working with our customers has shown that side navigation makes it easier for users to navigate the product structure, enabling them to view all menu options at once without additional clicks. Additional benefits include:
- Quicker access to frequently used features or pages
- Better visualization of user’s current location within the application and improved understanding of application structure
- Allows for more menu options to be displayed at once, reducing clicks
- Enhanced visibility of key features such as search bars and user settings
- Improved ability to accommodate many menu items without sacrificing usability
Expanded license compliance logic and faster reporting for Snow Atlas
License compliance improvements for Windows Server
- Windows Server 2022 is now included in compliance calculation with the same coverage rules as Windows Server 2016 and 2019.
- New risks added for compliance calculation (such as having hardware that has less cores per machine/processor)
- Improved assessment logic so now Windows Server 2022 can also be recommended, lowering compliance risk and potentially identifying cost savings opportunities
Easier navigation
- Responding to customer feedback, adding agreements, licenses and custom objects moved to the corresponding list page as a link in the top right corner for faster and easier navigation
- Easier of execution of routine tasks by relocation of start compliance calculation buttons from navigation menu to page header
Faster reporting
- Improved generation speed for “Applications per computer” and “All computers” reports, delivering faster insight and greater efficiency
- Reports can now be distributed using .zip file format, making it possible to email large reports to team members
What’s next?
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