Mastering Cost Intelligence with ServiceNow

The pressure to manage costs while driving digital transformation has never been greater. As highlighted in Cognizant’s recent research, cost optimization has overtaken operational effectiveness as the top business priority for the first time. This shift underscores the critical need for robust cost intelligence in technology investments.

Cloud Costs Just Got Real

As businesses move more workloads to the cloud, they're allocating larger portions of their budgets to cloud computing and services. However, managing these services at scale presents significant challenges. According to our research, only 57% of executives say they have effective visibility over costs - a decrease from 73% in 2022.

Where ServiceNow Comes into Play

ServiceNow offers a suite of tools designed to address these challenges and provide total insight into technology spending, particularly with the cloud. For example, their Software Asset Management and Cloud Cost Management solutions work in tandem to provide a comprehensive view of your total cloud expenditure across SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS. This unified view is crucial, especially considering that 65% of respondents in our study say they have insufficient capability to effectively track the value that tech is delivering in their organization.

More specifically, Cloud Cost Management doesn't just show you the numbers; it uses intuitive automation to optimize your cloud infrastructure costs. For instance, it can detect when a server is overallocated by $5,000 and instantly offer a one-click solution to resize it to a more cost-effective model. And then it can instantly pull back unused SaaS licenses to eliminate that unnecessary spend. This is particularly important as our research found that technology costs, especially licensing, are rising at double the rate of inflation for many organizations.

That’s where Software Asset Management enters. With a baked-in SaaS License Management capability, you gain visibility into over 80,000 applications along with deep usage analysis to ensure you're getting the most out of your SaaS investments. ServiceNow’s CIO Dashboard takes the level of visibility a step further, providing executive leaders with critical and minute-to-minute insights across various ServiceNow applications – IT Service Management, IT Operations Management, IT Asset Management, Security Operations, and Strategic Portfolio Management. As decentralized "shadow IT" spending grows, the CIO Dashboard infuses much-needed capabilities to help leadership drive outcomes and scale the business.

Maximizing Your ServiceNow Investment

While ServiceNow provides powerful tools for cost optimization, implementing these solutions effectively is key to realizing their full potential. This is where our Landmark: Asset Management offering comes into play.

Landmark: Asset Management is a Built With ServiceNow offering that centralizes and optimizes your Asset Management program. It begins with the Landmark Survey, a technology-driven assessment of your organization's asset environment, including software and cloud, that delivers rapid value in maturity insight and roadmap development. With its identification of underutilized assets across all classes, Landmark shares an objective recommendation of which ServiceNow tools and workstreams are best suited to reduce your organization's cloud-related costs - a critical capability when our study shows that cost optimization is now the top business priority.

From Intelligence Comes Optimization

With ServiceNow and Thirdera, a Cognizant company you gain cost intelligence that can drive your organization toward more efficient, effective, and economical use of technology resources. – which could be the competitive edge your business needs.

If interested in learning how to reduce your cloud costs and resize your software footprint, connect with one of our platform experts.