TIMING IS EVERYTHING. When the global pandemic forced businesses to accelerate adoption of cloud and SaaS applications for their newly remote workforces, it laid bare the increasing problem of SaaS sprawl. Enter startup Augmentt in August 2020 with a platform for discovering, optimizing, and managing SaaS applications.
“”What was a very interesting SaaS management opportunity in 2019 [became] an absolute criticality in 2020 and 2021,”” says Derik Belair (pictured), president and CEO. Belair and the firm’s other co-founder and Chairman, Gavin Garbutt, are former leaders of RMM pioneer N-able (now part of SolarWinds) who aim to do for SaaS and cloud “”what RMM does for networks and servers and infrastructure.””
For MSPs, the Augmentt platform is “”a great way to be able to start to build out a SaaS services business beyond just managing Office 365,”” Belair says, adding that it complements and works with existing RMMs.
“”Purchasing a piece of SaaS software is very easy,”” he says, but the challenge is “”making all of that technology work, making sure that SaaS usage is authorized, that the organization understands what their employees are using and what are the potential security and productivity and cost-related issues with that usage.””
Augmentt addresses those challenges with components called Discover, which identifies and classifies every SaaS application across the network; and Optimize, which tracks users, usage, and spend associated with all the subscriptions. Engage, which Belair says will be available in April, provides centralized management and visibility along with reports and dashboards.
To ensure that partners succeed, Augmentt Academy “”is a learning management system that helps the MSP and their employees start to understand how to deliver these programs and how to price them,”” Belair explains. And Augmentt Assist is what he calls “”a white glove service”” that helps MSPs with tasks such as deployment, implementation, and customization.
While Augmentt aims to have a few hundred partners by year-end, the intention is “”making sure that our partners that we do bring on are successful.””
