$480k savings in less than a year

The Challenge

Piano, a digital experience platform headquartered in Amsterdam, was founded in 2016 to make data more accessible and applicable for digital organizations. The company quickly expanded internationally and grew its business with several acquisitions of data and marketing tools. Following a year of 400% growth, Piano was in an excellent position to continue its forward trajectory. 

The finance and operations team knew that using SaaS tools was imperative to support a global team with ambitious growth plans, but they identified that managing multiple vendor contracts had become convoluted and that the company did not possess sufficient procurement expertise internally. With a decentralized process and overlapping tools following several acquisitions, Piano began looking for a path to create more structure and control in its purchasing processes. The team also believed there was potential for cost savings across their tech stack.

The Solution 

An early priority for the finance and operations team was to find a solution that would provide visibility into all the existing SaaS tools at Piano. 

It was also important for Piano to re-evaluate how much it was spending on SaaS tools. The finance team felt confident there were potential savings available on nearly every contract. 

After completing a stack analysis with Vertice, the finance team was impressed with the depth of vendor insights Vertice was able to provide. They were also grateful for the user-friendly dashboard and the potential for Vertice to save the finance team hours of time by handling all of their future negotiations. After understanding the cost savings potential they would achieve with Vertice, Piano established a partnership.

‍The Results 

Within a few weeks, Piano was fully onboarded and gained complete oversight of its tech stack. Now armed with this new visibility into the company’s tool, the finance team quickly distinguished key areas for immediate optimization. As the executive team focused on finding operational efficiencies across the business, Vertice was fundamental to this effort – analyzing vendor usage to ensure that Piano’s tech stack was right sized. The purchasing team also ran reports to understand and promote consolidating vendors for operational efficiency and cost savings. 

Vertice has acted as a true partner with the Piano operations team, not only providing time and cost efficiency on negotiations but also consulting on tool consolidation across the business and maintaining positive relationships with vendors. “Vertice has been instrumental in creating efficiency across our business. We work with them on a weekly basis to ensure strategic decisions about our software and providers in order to optimize our investments and set ourselves up for future success.” said Thomas Fisher, Head of Technical Operations at Piano.   

Additionally, Vertice was able to save Piano over $100,000 on a recent software renewal by engaging the vendor early and consolidating multiple tools onto a single platform. During the relationship, Vertice has saved Piano more than $480,000, resulting in a 600% return on their investment. Further, Vertice’s cross-functional support has provided clarity and predictability for Piano’s tech spend, while helping it plan for future growth.