Since its inception in 2014, Acast has developed the world's most powerful podcast marketplace and built technology that connects podcast creators, advertisers, and listeners. Their marketplace has over 100,000 podcasts and more than 400 million monthly listens. Acast operates in a global market with headquarters in Stockholm and has been publicly listed since 2021.
Better control over services and how users utilize them
An increasingly time-consuming management of services, costs, and licenses led Dragan Ovrlinic, Global Director of IT, to see a need to find a dedicated SaaS management platform to replace the internal processes and solutions they were using. For Acast, it was important to have a more accessible overview of how employees use the cloud services they have access to and to be able to shut down unused licenses.
"The improved overview has made it possible to track things we couldn't before - Substly has helped a lot."
- Dragan Ovrlinic, Global Director of IT
Some other important aspects for Acast were being able to identify when employees use services that their IT department has not sanctioned (so-called Shadow IT) and gathering all their contracts and information about them, such as when they renew, who is responsible, etc., in one place.
Implementing Substly has also reduced time spent on manual tasks. They have streamlined their employee offboarding processes, for example, which has resulted in drastic time savings.
"The time we spend offboarding an employee has decreased by 90% since we implemented Substly."
- Dragan Ovrlinic, Global Director of IT
A user-friendly and cost-effective system
A major advantage for Acast was that Substly was easy to start and learn. It only took them 20 minutes to sync services to Substly from their Google Workspace account and about a working day to structure users and costs and customize their account the way they wanted. Substly is less complex and more cost-effective compared to other larger players in the SaaS management industry. This made it possible for Acast to justify the investment in a SaaS management platform. The simplicity of Substly also means that people outside the IT department in Acast use the system to, for example, get an overview of costs associated with their team or different services.
"It shouldn't be complex. It should be easy to learn and don’t take too much time."
- Dragan Ovrlinic, Global Director of IT
Working with a smaller vendor like Substly
Acast had previously evaluated several SaaS management platforms but always found them too expensive to provide a positive ROI. In discussions with Substly, it became clear that a less complex system and a more cost-effective solution better suited Acast. Some other factors that played a role were that Substly has a pronounced focus on small and medium-sized businesses and is a smaller vendor in the SaaS management industry, which opens up for closer collaboration and the ability to influence ongoing product development.
"Substly has competitors with more features. But that doesn't mean their products are better, just larger."
- Dragan Ovrlinic, Global Director of IT
