How Vertice saved Lighthouse $170,000 on a single SaaS contract

Lighthouse, a leading cloud-based data intelligence platform for the hospitality industry, launched in 2012 to help hotels visualize and leverage data.

The company is headquartered in London and today has more than 300 employees.

Lighthouse was expanding quickly and their SaaS spend was increasing even further.

After receiving $80 million in Series B funding back in 2021, Lighthouse experienced rapid growth, including a notable team expansion and two acquisitions. But as the headcount grew, so did the company’s software portfolio, which quickly became unmanageable due to a decentralized procurement process and lack of visibility into the tools being used across the organization.

This ultimately left Lighthouse with a two-fold problem.

First, the department heads that were responsible for managing their team’s subscriptions weren’t aware of the renewal schedules, leaving them with no time to negotiate better deals, subsequently resulting in contracts auto-renewing at higher price and often on unfavorable terms. Second, it wasn’t clear how each tool was being utilized, which meant that they were paying for more licenses than they needed. Both issues left the company paying substantially more for its software than it should have been.

The leadership team at Lighthouse knew they had to improve their procurement process and the way the organization managed its software. They were specifically looking for three things: full visibility into their technology stack, time savings for their department heads, and confidence that they were paying the right prices for the tools they were using.

The team’s initial thoughts were to hire someone internally to achieve these initiatives, however it was while they were considering their options that they discovered Vertice.

Despite initial concern about the additional time it might take to manage Vertice, they quickly realized that we would be acting as an in-house procurement partner and actually saving them a significant amount of time.

They also knew that by working with us, they would benefit from our team’s negotiation expertise and our access to industry pricing benchmarks.

This, combined with the results of a spend audit, which provided them with an idea of just how much they could be saving, finally convinced them that Vertice was the right choice.

Vertice provided immediate value to Lighthouse, negotiating a strategic contract within the first week. Through our pricing data intelligence and negotiation expertise, Lighthouse, formally known as OTA Insight, yielded 188% return on their year one investment from that first contract. Since the beginning of the partnership, Lighthouse has saved over $300,000.

Lighthouse now has unprecedented visibility into its SaaS stack, which includes more than 90 software vendors and over $2.5 million in software spend.

Leveraging Vertice as its procurement partner also means that Lighthouse can rely on Vertice’s SaaS discovery insights to compare and analyze a new DevOps tool. This insight helped them make the right decision for their business goals while saving the team both time and stress.