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IT Brew

Billy Hurley

itbrew.com

Yes, password managers are still an important SaaS security measure

Multi-factor authentication offers extra help.

Despite hacks, password managers are still an important SaaS security measure

Friends taking pictures of food on the table with smartphones during brunch in restaurant

The first security step when it comes to applications? Find them all 

Inventory tools can help, as long as you know what to look for.

A blue diagram circle with SaaS in the middle surrounded by business icons

SaaS

Brianna Monsanto

Trust is the foundation of all relationships. That’s why several tech companies are expanding their C-suites with an executive whose sole job is ensuring their company maintains high levels of integrity with customers.

These chief trust officers, or CTrOs, are C-suite executives who build stakeholder trust in their company, including in how it handles and secures consumer data. According to an 

, the role has emerged over the past decade amongst tech and B2B software companies in response to various issues, including the potential to use technology and data for privacy abuse, bias, and harassment.

“Effectively, what the role does is offer assurance to the customers or potential customers of that organization that their data, their information, their technology, the infrastructure, the platform itself, can be trusted as those customers adopt it,” Forrester VP and Principal Analyst Jeff Pollard told IT Brew. “So, it goes a little bit beyond security.”

In recent years, the CTrO role has found its way in the C-suites of various tech companies, including Salesforce and Autodesk. Pollard said it could be beneficial for a company to hire a CTrO because it escalates the responsibility of trust into an “executive priority.”

“You’re making them a member of the C-suite, which, in itself, shows an intentionality that I think is positive because it should influence the rest of what the company does,” Pollard said.

He added that designating a leader to be in charge of trust allows “more focus for the roles that roll up to the CTrO as opposed to everyone trying to do everything.”

However, adding a CTrO to your C-suite can come with baggage if not done properly, according to Pollard, who said the reporting structures associated with the role may unintentionally separate professionals from the technical side of their business.

“One of the very realistic concerns here, from a chief trust officer perspective, is when you’re broken out of the technology work and you span beyond that…just by definition, you do lose some insight as to what the tech org is doing,” he said.

 Chris Peake became CTrO at revenue AI platform company Gong in August. He told IT Brew his role combines IT and security at the SaaS provider.

“Day-to-day operationally, it’s addressing historical things on both the IT side of making sure that we’ve got systems up and running that support the business, [and] controlling endpoints and all those kinds of things,” Peake said, adding he is also responsible for making sure security is built into Gong’s products.

Peake, a former CISO, said a lot of the skills from his previous role have translated into his current one. However, he said the CTrO role differs from the CISO role because it operates more on the “business level,” as the work done by a CTrO can directly impact revenue generation, contract negotiation, and onboarding new customers.

“I think that’s why we see a lot of the chief trust officers are former CISOs, because there is a natural fit there,” Peake said. “It’s just adding that next layer.”

 Forrester claims the CTrO role is more than just a “passing trend,” perhaps unlike 

“If it does disappear, I don’t think the need for someone to oversee trust disappears,” Pollard said. “Maybe the title does, but if it does then it’s subsumed by the CISO…hopefully they use that as part of their new remit to expand upon what they’ve done in the past and not just be the sort of legacy department of ‘no.’”

Meet the new trending C-suite role: the chief trust officer

Why more SaaS companies are hiring chief trust officers 

Software companies are hiring chief trust officers to foster transparency with consumers.

ITB VE: If you give a SaaS subscription video embed

Speakers

Questions?

From cloud chaos to AI disruption, today’s SaaS sprawl needs more than cleanup—it needs strategy. Join IT Brew to learn how to streamline your stack and prepare your portfolio for whatever comes next.

If You Give a SaaS a Subscription: Maximizing Value for the Modern IT Stack 

Nate Buniva, who advises companies on contract strategy, says today’s IT agreements with service providers would be better served with some expanded adaptability. Agreements need to be written carefully to absorb sudden cost hikes—like, say, a jump in prices following a raft of new tariffs.

“Any time that there’s an economic shift or uncertainty or headlines, we find that these IT providers can, not necessarily nefariously, but can leverage that as a way to prop up a pricing conversation and say, ‘With tariffs now coming into play, our costs are going up,’” Buniva, a partner at consultancy West Monroe, told us.

“Now more than ever, it’s time to look at those contracts and see where you have bargaining power and where you don’t,” he said.

Here are some details he advises his clients to consider in new and current contracts:

 Your bill shouldn’t just be for general “support,” according to Buniva, who pushes clients to understand specific costs of hardware, software, and labor. Then, you can better make the argument of whether or not a tariff directly impacts an IT service cost, Buniva said. He also often recommends inputting a “no cost passed through without documentation” clause.

Early termination clauses based on events concerning economic uncertainty. 

Clients should be able to cancel an IT contract like it’s Netflix, Buniva shared in a follow-up email. “You don’t want to be locked into long-term commitments when priorities or budgets shift,” he wrote.

Buniva has inserted written obligations where the provider agrees to an annual percentage reduction, “because they’re going to learn your environment better and be able to deliver more efficiently,” thanks to advancements in tech like AI, Buniva said.

 Contracts should specify sourcing sites, Buniva told us, to help customers understand tariff impacts. A client could insert contractual language to specify that a vendor must have multiple locations to deliver services from and to purchase hardware. “You want an outsourcing partner that can offer that kind of flexibility,” Buniva wrote, following the interview.

 on Chinese imports and a minimum 10% tariff on all US imports. (Many big tech companies 

While managed service providers (MSP) frequently deliver software to customers, providers may also assist in the installation of servers or other equipment, which could be subjected to tariffs.

Service providers typically handle tariffs or focused taxes by passing them to the customer, according to Rob Enderle, IT analyst and owner of advisory firm Enderle Group, and the contracts are usually written to allow for that hand-off, because taxes are outside an MSP’s control.

IT pros, however, must be careful to not create a contract that’s unprofitable for the provider.

“You don’t want a provider that’s under stress. The quality of their services are going to decline because, as they attempt to at least get to break-even point, they’re going to be cutting things, and those things could result in that degradation of service,” Enderle said.

Buniva sees customers with leverage lately and “rock-bottom” MSP prices as providers compete for GenAI and other services.

“That potential threat of competitive pressure,” Buniva said, “that’s one of the easiest, strongest levers to pull with IT providers to get them to either give the information that you want or get a little more flexible.”


An illustration shows a fence around the US and tariff percentages printed along its border.

How to build a smarter IT contract for tariff times

Contract advisor Nate Buniva shares how line-item pricing and certain termination clauses can help.

Cloud marketplaces are increasingly becoming a moneymaking sales channel for 

 companies as buyers turn to the medium to reap benefits like an efficient procurement process.

 found that 62% software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies bring in net-new revenue through cloud marketplaces. More than one-fifth (22%) revealed they are generating over 20% of their revenue from the medium.

The report surveyed more than 100 “emerging and established software companies.”

Clazar co-founder and CEO Trunal Bhanse told IT Brew that part of the momentum for B2B software companies to sell on cloud marketplaces comes from the incentives offered by cloud providers to sellers on their platforms.

“All the three big hyperscalers are very incentivized to have this be the default motion in the next decade of buying and selling, because it aligns extremely well with their own consumption goals,” he said.

Bhanse added that a shift in buyer behavior has also allowed software companies to see greater success when selling through the marketplace.

“Customers want faster procurement,” Bhanse said. “They want to burn down their cloud budgets and they trust the cloud marketplaces they already use.”

 Bhanse predicts that B2B software companies will begin to follow the playbook of top cloud marketplace performers. But is the future of the cloud just becoming a selling point for SaaS tools?

Brooke Cunningham, CMO at LogicMonitor, told IT Brew that while the company does leverage cloud marketplaces to tap new customers, it is not its only route to market, nor its largest. She noted that the marketplace is a key part of how the company thinks about reaching new and existing customers, but remained skeptical of the channel becoming a sole method to reach enterprise customers within the industry.

“Based on the buying behaviors and dynamics seen in the market, no, I don’t believe that we are going to see that the marketplaces and the cloud providers are going to be the only route to market,” Cunningham said. “In fact, we’re seeing trends in the opposite direction.”

Shannon Mason, chief strategy officer at Tempo Software, told IT Brew that the marketplace is a “core component” of its route-to-market strategy. However, she said diversification remains a priority for Tempo because of how market dynamics can impact where revenue is coming from.

“Keep diversification at the front of your mind, because that’s just a smart business strategy, but keep your finger on the pulse of what’s changing from your business,” Mason said.

SaaS providers are seeing success in the cloud marketplace

Over 20% of SaaS companies generate more than one-fifth of their revenue from cloud marketplaces.

That new help desk software, password manager, or employee recognition system sure seems convenient, but it doesn’t take much for that SaaS tool-du-jour to turn into “shelfware,” a term noting a platform that sits—ware, you ask?—

Pros and analysts who spoke with IT Brew said IT can help keep 

 off the shelf and on their fellow colleagues’ minds in four major ways.

 Brian Westfall, associate principal analyst at Gartner-owned Capterra, recommended IT pros answer integration questions before the company selects a tool. Can data from a new employee engagement tool, for example, be fed to a talent-management service like Workday?

“If [IT is] coming in after the purchase, just for implementation purposes, that’s too late,” Westfall said.

 program and software assets, Lindbergh Matillano, director of cost optimization at tax compliance company Avalara, must forecast the correct number of licenses for a tool—a task made easier when an IT pro understands business drivers for the service’s use, he said. Most employees can do a headcount; the “tricky part,” Matillano noted, is determining who will actually use the software.

“If you make a bad bet, you have a lot of waste in there. And I like to say: Your dollars are stuck in licenses that are expiring,” Matillano told IT Brew.

He suggests starting with the low number and not falling for the potential “trap” of purchasing swaths of licenses at a discount. “Oftentimes you can negotiate going up in terms of licenses; it’s very difficult to negotiate down,” Matillano said, noting sales-team pressures.

IT can also find integration points, including everyday communications platforms like Slack or Teams, to encourage use and prevent employee frustration—like when employers want feedback, according to Westfall.

“If you’re telling me you want me to fill out a pulse survey for my employer, and I have to drop what I’m doing, I have to go log into a new tool. I have to add all my information, I have to figure out how it works…You’re going to see participation rates just plummet,” Westfall said.

 found that HR employees say 50% of their software systems perform overlapping functions.

IT has a role to play to learn how an SaaS tool’s usage rates (often available within the products themselves), and to perform regular audits to see where features overlap, according to Westfall, who hinted at a finding soon to be featured in upcoming Capterra research: IT teams need to be off the shelf and in on SaaS implementation.

“We’ve found consistently that successful software buyers, they do better. They land on a purchase they are happy with more often when they have IT involved,” Westfall said.

Four ways IT can help keep SaaS from being ‘shelfware’

Make the right bet on licenses, one pro cautions.

Eoin Higgins

When it comes to pricing out how companies and teams use software-as-a-service (SaaS), consumers aren’t often given much of a choice—but that could be changing due to market forces and an uncertain economy.

Pricing models are usually based on a per-user, level of consumption fee—in theory, effectively allowing the provider to let some lower-level users subsidize higher-level users by setting the cost near the median. Per-user pricing, Gartner analyst Stephen White told IT Brew, is the industry norm due in large part to convenience.

“Per-user license commitment, regardless of whether the user makes effective use of it—consumes it—it still costs the organization the same amount,” White said. “That’s by far the predominant model; there is a limited degree to which consumption billing has progressed.”

The predictability of the consumer user pricing model is in some ways a benefit to both vendor and consumer, White told IT Brew, making it seem unlikely that there’s a major shift coming anytime soon. But as RBC software analyst Rishi Jaluria 

 Insider, business models tend to grow in a more consumer-friendly direction over time, and SaaS is unlikely to be any different. Giving customers the ability to only pay for what they use is a logical next step.

Some vendors are considering a consumption model as the future of the industry: paying for the resources as you use them, effectively metering for SaaS.

“It is very likely, in my opinion, that there will be more companies that are either on a consumption model or offer a consumption element to the model,” Jaluria said.

John Santoro, an analyst with Gartner, agreed. Billing customers on a per-user basis isn’t preferable if the alternative is losing them completely, he told Insider.

“I think that it’s important for providers to provide options to customers…so that when the customers become more price-sensitive, they have options other than dropping the product entirely,” Santoro said.

California-based company Amberflo aims to take advantage of this market opportunity by providing software that makes metered usage and pricing a reality. The company’s founder and CEO Puneet Gupta 

 in January that metering is advantageous to providers in part because it can help them retain customers who might otherwise be inclined to cancel memberships over higher cost than use.

“In the subscription world, nobody tracks usage,” Gupta said. “Companies are actually disincentivized to track usage.”

Do you work in IT or have information about your IT department you want to share? Email eoin@morningbrew.com.

Economic headwinds could change SaaS pricing models in good news for consumers

While per-user pricing is more predictable, metered pricing is gaining support and could be the future. 

Tom McKay

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) can offer advantages to many organizations looking to replace legacy systems or build new functionality, including flexibility, scalability, and the potential cost savings of on-demand service.

 enterprise services and determining which solution works best—from initial evaluation to trialing and planning eventual implementation—can be a complicated process. Experts who spoke with IT Brew had tips on how to navigate those steps without upending users’ experience and with minimal disruption.

 Frank Scavo, president of Avasant Research, told IT Brew that one critical factor is the strength of an organization’s formal processes for identifying key requirements.

“It’s like going to the grocery store without a shopping list,” Scavo said. “You’re gonna come back with beer and chips.”

For example, Scavo said, a small to midsize company evaluating a CRM system would have to distinguish whether it needs to handle B2B, B2C, or multichannel interactions, and task a core group of users to practice test data against that system—the most important factor being whether it fits those core needs.

“In the old days, you could not easily do a proof of concept with an old on-premises system, because you still had to install it, you still had to configure it, [and] fill and set up the database,” Scavo said. “Those steps have been greatly reduced if not eliminated with modern SaaS solutions.”

Ben Pippenger, co-founder and chief business development and strategy officer at SaaS management platform Zylo, told IT Brew that organizations should conceptualize what’s wrong with a current system before replacing it.

“Do my employees like using it? Are they using it? Are we using the full capabilities that we purchased?” Pippenger suggested asking. “I want to make sure I’m understanding all those elements of the system I’m replacing,” he said.

Determining whether the new system will play nice with legacy ones can become an “enterprise architecture question more than like a contracting or trial question,” Pippenger added.

Check your references, scan those contracts.

 SaaS sales pitches may make claims about factors like effectiveness, guaranteed uptime, level of support, or cost savings that are hard to independently verify—which is why the experts say it’s important to comb reviews, ask for references, and check with industry colleagues.

“Outside of getting feedback from your peer set and getting reference calls…you usually do need to take the word of the vendor a lot of times in those scenarios, and then just make sure you’re protected in the contract,” Pippenger said.

Scavo warned that buyers often leave themselves vulnerable to cost overruns by failing to understand pricing models. Failing to adequately anticipate how SaaS providers’ pricing might work in relation to sizing could saddle them with cost overruns.

“Some of them are priced by number of users, some of them are priced by the number of records, [or] a CRM system might be priced by the number of contacts [and] they don’t care how many emails you send out,” Scavo told IT Brew.  “It’s important to understand the basis that you’re being charged at and manage that very carefully.”

 Pippenger told IT Brew that when trialing SaaS, prospective customers should try not to lose focus on the fundamental question: whether it hits those core business requirements.

“I would definitely recommend going through it and carving off a very specific use case that you’re trying to get to as part of that trial,” Pippenger said. “You start to boil the ocean, and it’s no longer a trial, it’s now an implementation.”

Scavo said the most common mistake when moving to operational implementation of a new SaaS system is a lack of contingency plans.

“If something doesn’t work, how do we fall back or recover to the old system? That’s probably the most important part,” Scavo asked.

“It’s easier with two SaaS providers because it is an on-demand system, your old system and your new system,” Scavo added. “So, you can keep the old one running during the period where you’re making that transition…it gives you a little more flexibility.”

Do you work in IT or have information about your IT department you want to share? Email tomm@morningbrew.com. Want to go encrypted? Ask Tom for his Signal.