Understanding the Business Value of IT Assets
When companies started embracing the cloud, understanding how technology-related decisions would impact the rest of the business suddenly became important. For larger companies, it was particularly imperative, as total enterprise IT budgets ballooned to billions of dollars. Today, with nearly every business having at least some technology budget, being able to understand and communicate IT spend is an absolute necessity.
As demand for remote work continues to grow and cyber threats remain ubiquitous, the complexity of IT has skyrocketed. Networks must be resilient and capable of handling massive, disparate loads, even as IT budgets tighten due to rising interest rates and more restricted access to capital. According to Gartner, 2022 was a rare instance of companies spending less on digital business tools than in the previous year, with global IT spending dropping 0.2% to $4.38 trillion. Technology, including cloud hosting, cybersecurity tooling, and all the various digital solutions that make remote work feasible, remains an essential line item. Nevertheless, today’s IT teams must prove the ROI of their budgets and devise ways to do more with less IT spend.
To endure periods of economic volatility, companies meticulously review the value their IT spend is returning to their business. This is why we were excited to partner with Proven Optics, a software company that empowers IT and finance leaders to modernize their financial management operations and tap into the necessary analytics and insights to make better business decisions.
Historically, IT and finance departments combined disparate data sources across multiple departments to understand the full cost of their IT assets. They wrote scripts to access every app and update data, wrote code to configure and modify modeling apps, and manually built workflows to keep datasets updated. Some even resorted to creating and maintaining incredibly complex (and error-prone!) Excel spreadsheets. Despite the significant time and effort required, overly simplistic data points rarely provided sufficient context, leading to poor budget recommendations.
With Proven Optics, IT asset data is gathered by filling out simple forms, and modeling apps are configured and modified via a user-friendly portal. Data is displayed holistically via a single pane of glass and the product’s out-of-the-box workflows ensure regular data updates. By providing access to more sophisticated, contextual budget insights, Proven Optics allows IT and finance leaders to provide more proactive and impactful budget recommendations to their organizations.
Proven Optics is built on the ServiceNow platform and delivered through the ServiceNow App Store. They offer tailored solutions for numerous verticals, including federal and state governments, education, healthcare, and consumer goods enterprises. In January 2023, ServiceNow doubled down on its successful partnership with Proven Optics, making a strategic investment in the company.
Prior to our investment, Proven Optics was entirely bootstrapped by its founders and co-CEOs, Bill Miller and Ben Perkins. Bill brings the edge of a true domain expert, respected industry thought leader and committed evangelist to the company, having previously served as IT CFO of Nationwide Insurance. Similarly, Ben has served in leadership roles focused on Project Portfolio Management (PPM) and HP Implementations.
It’s always a special opportunity to partner with founder-led businesses, and we couldn’t be more thrilled to support Proven Optics and their already-impressive momentum. In just two years, the Proven Optics team has built a fast-growing, capital efficient business with a customer roster that includes the U.S. Energy Department, the U.S. Mint, the Mayo Clinic, Cigna Healthcare and Kraft. In particular, we’re excited to leverage our experience supporting ecosystem-driven investments to help Proven Optics bring their financial management software to more businesses in both the public and private sectors. Together, our mission is to bring more clarity and actionability to the most complex technology budgets and to enable companies to continuously derive optimal value from their IT assets.
