The founders of Augmentt Technology–Gavin Garbutt and Derik Belair–are an impressive duo with 35 years of combined channel experience; most of it spent building, marketing, and selling Cloud and SaaS applications to the MSP community.
As the founders and leaders of N-able Technologies–sold to SolarWinds in 2013–they witnessed the unprecedented adoption of SaaS. This new model has significant benefits, but it also has many challenges.
For example, there are security, compliance, and cost control issues in an environment where the average salesperson uses Calendly to book meetings, Google Calendar to manage them, Zoom to host the meeting, Dropbox to share files post-meeting, and a CRM to record a prospect’s attendance.
The combination of SaaS-first environments and the sheer number of applications performing various tasks made it clear that businesses, particularly companies with 50+ employees, need a way to manage and make sense of all these different products.
That’s where the idea for Augmentt came from, and the company was established to address those challenges.
“Augmentt Technology Inc. is a Software-As-A-Service (SaaS) Application Management Platform Provider. It manages the customer’s SaaS ecosystem and helps them save money and gain greater visibility and control. The SaaS model enables companies to reduce capital costs, lower infrastructure requirements, lower barriers to entry, shorten implementation time, and reduce learning curves. Augmentt’s Channel enabled platform was designed to help organizations benefit from all of the above, while understanding SaaS usage, spend, security policies, and operations. The end goal is that companies can make better SaaS decisions,” said Derik Belair, Co-Founder, and CEO of Augmentt Technology.
While purchasing SaaS products has never been easier, optimizing SaaS usage and controlling SaaS spend has become a strategic imperative for both end-user businesses and MSPs alike. While many organizations like to think they have a grasp on what’s going on, Corporate IT security professionals estimate they have 30 to 40 apps when the reality is a staggering 928 apps. The 800+ gap is what’s known as Shadow IT.
Augmentt’s technology simplifies and automates SaaS management, making it easier and far more effective for MSPs to help SMEs solve for one of the most vexing business and technology challenges they face today.
In essence, Augmentt Technology sheds light on these applications, brings them out of the shadows, and helps companies figure out the proper usage of these applications, why and how they’re being used, and how that lines up with the corporate policy. Many of the organization’s focus has been on helping outsourced IT teams or MSPs help their clients with SaaS management services.
On Augmentt’s journey to becoming one of the 50 best companies, they’ve done more than solve a major business challenge. They’ve done an excellent job at tracking key business data, and taking calculated risks that have helped the company to grow and achieve impressive results. They’ve stayed focused and, last but not least, never compromised on providing consistently great service.
“We are very excited and have been incredibly fortunate to have been able to build a business with amazing people and great technology. Being recognized as one of the 50 best companies is a true honor for us and is a reflection of the amazing team and incredible market opportunity that lies ahead for Augmentt,” added Belair.
Augmentt Technology has worked within several industries and with companies of different sizes. In one instance, Augmentt Technology helped Atom HR and staffing to onboard new applications. And in another example, Tampa National Savings and Loans updated its outdated infrastructure while improving security with the Augmentt SaaS Platform’s aid. The results for both the organizations were groundbreaking and have helped both organizations achieve their goals.
The coronavirus pandemic has created a lot of uncertainty. The most obvious impact is that many companies are now looking at ways to cut costs and stay lean. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic caused the global economy to crater, SMEs were already casting a critical eye on their monthly software spending, which accelerated this trend. The average company spends 30% to 40% more on SaaS applications than it needs to. Many applications are never used at all; too often, more licenses are bought than are required, and competing software is even used to perform similar tasks.
Augmentt’s technology simplifies and automates SaaS management, making it easier and far more effective for MSPs to help SMEs solve for one of the most vexing business and technology challenges they face today.
Another impact COVID-19 had is on security. Companies were caught unaware by sudden work from home orders and, in certain instances, even allowed employees to use personal devices to conduct business and purchase unauthorized SaaS products.
That’s unlikely to be permitted once the pandemic ends, and they’re going to need a way to clean up the mess it’s caused. With a SaaS management platform, companies can easily track usage of unauthorized SaaS applications to enforce SaaS security policies. They can also quickly automate SaaS provisioning, de-provisioning, and the approval process, which makes it easy to onboard remote employees.
Augmentt is leveraging modern cloud technology to build its platform. It provides the organization with incredible flexibility and agility in solving its client’s unique challenges and will continue to create solutions to help MSPs build SaaS services. Augmentt is currently selling in North America, UK, Australian, and New Zealand. Augmentt plans to expand its efforts to the rest of English-speaking Europe and South Africa.
