Applango Offers New Look into SaaS Usage to Help Organizations Get a True Return on Investment

STAMFORD, Conn., Sept. 16, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Applango, a new software company that collects, analyzes and reports on the usage of mission-critical SaaS applications, launched today. The company aims to solve the massive adoption issues and inefficient business processes that have plagued the software-as-a-service (SaaS) industry by revealing usage data they've never had access to – until now.

Organizations are planning to spend $20B on SaaS in 2014, growing 33 percent from last year.^[i] They are relying on these applications to get business done, but it takes a significant amount of time and effort to implement them enterprise-wide. Today, all organizations are experiencing some combination of ineffective, low, or non-usage of their SaaS investments because the intended processes are not happening properly. The pay-off is hindered due to low employee adoption and resistance to changing processes and using new tools. Very often, the reports that should reveal these behaviors are incomplete, untimely or inaccurate. Applango's mission is to solve that.

The company offers a single, simple solution to collect, analyze and report effective and inefficient usage of mission-critical SaaS applications including Salesforce.com, Box and Google Apps throughout an organization. By gaining granular usage data, companies can view individual user behavior for every activity on any of the application's functions.

"I am a mechanical engineer by training and in manufacturing, there are clear processes and technology in place to spot inefficiencies, improper usage and poor outcomes. The SaaS space is dramatically behind in this respect, and critical processes are often broken with no fixes," said Daniel Sarfati, founder and CEO of Applango. "Until now, there was no way for companies to gather detailed SaaS usage data to identify and address such issues. We're helping companies ensure the best use of SaaS applications to minimize losses, recognize 'best practices' and ultimately impact the bottom line."

In the case of customer relationship management (CRM) tools, poor adoption is no secret. In a 2014 survey, CSO Insights found that less than 37 percent of sales representatives actually use their company's CRM system. Here are a few examples of how Applango's data solved the pain points:

• A 1,000 employee, cloud-based customer intelligence platform vendor, made a large investment in Salesforce.com. However, users were not adopting the application and the company did not have detailed visibility into usage. Applango showed exactly how and when people used specific features and functions in Salesforce.com. Then, the company was able to immediately identify 'problem-users' and launch an internal campaign to correct the usage patterns. As a result, the IT team reorganized internal license allocations, optimizing license costs and improving adoption by 120 percent which drove higher efficiency - and higher revenue.
• A predictive marketing software company purchased 900 Community Portal licenses from Salesforce.com. Applango revealed that only about 75 of those 900 licenses were being used. Applango data showed that the process for reporting technical issues was broken. The new system put in place by the IT department was bypassed when users resisted moving to a new tool. The company could not see this happening with Salesforce's reports, but thanks to Applango, adoption increased 7.5 times in just 100 days. To learn more about these case studies, click here.

Applango's solution is fast to implement (10 minutes) and very lightweight; it consumes a small amount of internal resources with little to no IT maintenance. Companies can easily install Applango and receive initial usage data for free. Additional, detailed data and services are provided for a fee.  

Applango was founded in 2012 and has been in beta since last April.  It is a privately-held company and has raised $4.5M to date. Investors include OurCrowd, TekVest Startup Fund, State of Connecticut and angel investors.

For more information, please visit applango.com.

About Applango

Founded in 2012, Applango is a software company that provides a single, simple solution to collect highly detailed usage data for SaaS applications.  This data is then analyzed to report on the usage of critical SaaS applications throughout an organization.  Applango provides detailed usage of your mission critical SaaS applications in one place.  Applango is lightweight, IT friendly, fast to install, and needs few computing or human resources.  Companies worldwide are making major time and cost investments by adopting SaaS applications such as Salesforce.com, Box, Google Apps and Workday for their organization. Ineffective, low or even non-usage of the purchased applications wastes the initial investment and results in the loss of revenue because the SaaS applications have not been used as planned. Applango is helping IT and SaaS decision makers monitor the use of SaaS applications to ensure their proper use and identify employee "best practices" to incorporate across the organization.

Founded by Daniel Sarfati, Applango is a privately held company funded by OurCrowd, TekVest Startup Fund and angel investors.

The company's U.S. headquarters are in Stamford, CT with international headquarters in Israel. For more information, please visit applango.com.

^[i] Gartner

SOURCE Applango