Cloud-based tools may be easier for marketers to manage than on-premises versions, but there is still a fair amount of admin. That’s where startup Blissfully comes in.
Founded in 2016, the New York City-based firm provides a platform for managing software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications for about 600 client companies, mostly mid-sized with 100 to 1000 employees.
Subscription renewals, ops workflow. “Pretty much every business [these days] runs on SaaS,” CEO Ariel Diaz noted, adding that managing the applications tends to be a collaborative effort between IT, HR, marketing and other departments.
The Blissfully platform, he told me, helps to bridge that cross-departmental management by providing a collaborative administration where a manager can invite others to join, can assign access levels and can track usage.
It also tracks the metadata related to a company’s SaaS applications, such as when to renew a subscription, and how much your company is spending on its subscriptions and related costs. Additionally, it provides an operational workflow to help onboard new applications, to onboard or remove an employee from an app, or to assist with compliance for the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), SOC 2 or ISO 27001.
From Blissfully
Relevant documents, list of vendors. To help with compliance, the Blissfully platform directs the user to the relevant documents or certifications posted by the cloud-based application, and to the documents posted by the application’s associated vendors.
Some of those documents reside in Blissfully’s growing database, and others are posted by the applications or vendors themselves. There’s also a to-do list of requirements for compliance, and a system of record in case the client company ever needs to document its own compliance efforts.
Blissfully doesn’t, however, provide access to the functions in those apps, it doesn’t enable integration of application routines like Zapier or Tray.io, and it doesn’t provide access to customer data in those tools, as Segment does.
Competitors include spreadsheets. Marketers and other managers are already performing many of these operational capabilities, Diaz noted, but they’re often using manually-maintained spreadsheets or the like. A user can import an existing spreadsheet into Blissfully, after some prep, or can export the platform’s data to a variety of formats.
Diaz said that Blissfully’s competitors include BetterCloud, although he claimed that solution is deeper on IT and financial management for a handful of vendors, whereas his company goes “wider,” supports more SaaS vendors and is also designed to improve business operations.
Similarly, Zylo is more enterprise- and finance-oriented, he said, and Siftery — recently acquired by G2 Crowd — is more focused on tracking spending on SaaS apps and on their reviews.
Why you should care. Virtually all software applications are moving to the cloud, which makes their technical management less problematic but still leaves their administrative management.
A platform like Blissfully offers the operational tools for managing what can easily become dozens of subscriptions and renewal cycles, each with its own set of users and compliance issues. As marketers acquire more tools, tool management itself becomes a necessary task that requires the right tool.
This story first appeared on MarTech Today. For more on marketing technology, click here.
About The Author
Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.