Maximizing SaaS Usage Visibility with ScalePad (EP 1041)

[0:12] Hello, friends. Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IT Business Podcast coming at you from Salt Lake City, home of Pats 8 Beyond 2026.

Podcast Row and New SaaS Tools

[0:22] And folks, I am winding down my time here on Podcast Row. I actually will be leaving early this year. Coming out to Salt Lake City was a little harder than it has been going to Denver. Couldn't get that direct flight and had to make some weird changes to get home at a decent hour without losing another day so this is my last interview and it's going to be interesting because it's a product that i use and i just realized i am not using it correctly so i have i have ryan from scale pad here and we're going to chat all about that ryan welcome thank you so, yeah we just did a mini demo yeah and.

[1:03] I'll be honest i'll give you just a quick history sure i started out using life cycle insights yeah and then i downgraded to life cycle manager yeah and i'm on the pro version okay, but i'll be honest all i've done for the last year or so is set up those automatic reports yeah i get the hardware inventory for my clients and that's about it it's great it's like those are all the like foundations of the product but this yeah like we've been working on so much more like the show did and apparently, i have not paid attention to the big sass management piece that is now a part of life cycle now brennan you've got other products as well you've got the backup radar the cloud quarter quarter backup radar c360 and control all those have been great products that you guys have brought in and integrated and but the sass management. That's a big thing. It's huge. It's like.

[1:54] Like we've been working on that for a while we did an acquisition of a company called produce eight last year and so the technology of that company was unbelievably good the use case was a little bit hard to kind of for msps to wrap their head around if anybody remembers kind of what that was but the technology was amazing and the team behind it was like just next level okay and so when we went through we did that acquisition brought that technology into the organization and then really rejigged it to be SaaS management. So for us, it was like, there's three components of asset. One is like your hardware asset, which we've always done really well. There is installed software, which you pick up through RMM or other tools. Like we bring that into Lifecycle Manager already for a while. But the big piece is like, okay, that's all great. But most clients are now using SaaS applications for a majority of their workflow. And like as MSPs, we have no visibility into what's likely the biggest spend of our clients' IT budgets. And so it felt like a big missing piece, and that's what we wanted to post. And I think that the only way that I've actually looked at it over the last few years and other products are starting to try to bring that in is we would go to our DNS web filter. Totally. And see what websites are our customers going to. And, you know, oh, you've got people going to Dropbox. You're not supposed to use in Dropbox, that sort of thing. but your SaaS management actually helped track.

[3:24] What products are being used as SaaS that either we don't know about and they're paying for, or we don't know how many users are actually using it. That's huge. Yeah, and whether like the concept of whether we've had a conversation about it and have we approved it and like, is there an already an agreement that that should be used or not? New product showing up into the environment being able to be flagged on those that like hey looks like they're demoing something new or and then the individual users that are using it looking at usage history over a period of time to see how that's changed how much time people are spending in all of those applications from active browser kind of tracking so yeah all that's available now and like basically for anybody that has pro it's included in their pro license which is kind of crazy something i did not know yeah because i have pro and apparently i've not turned it on i could have added for how long has it been out it's been out for three months now okay so we did a, big beta run on it with a couple of really large partners did a ton of testing but like for us it was like we're all former msps and so this was like, we just really wanted this to be part of what we we went to market okay so let

Agent Deployment for SaaS Tracking

[4:37] me ask this from a technical perspective i'm only using the lifecycle manager. I haven't tied in any of the other products.

[4:44] I know that right now, all of my stuff is just basically ingested from other products. To do the SaaS ingestion, is that still through other products or have you guys found a way to do an agent? Yeah, we have our own agent. So there's a completely silent, insanely lightweight agent deployment.

[5:02] For us, the agent deployment is the biggest thing because I think all MSPs know is like, oh yeah it's just a simple agent just deploy it and it turns into an absolute nightmare but we've been really like.

[5:15] Really focused on making that agent deployment as simple as possible. We've tested it in every single environment at length at this point. And the agent deployment methodology is the same one that Produce 8 was using that they worked on for three years. And so that was a big component of the acquisition was to get the technology associated with that. So we've done like hundreds of deployments at this point with almost zero issue, which has been kind of cool to watch. Now, when you say lightweight, how lightweight?

[5:43] Some people have said lightweight and it's, you know, taking up 2% of my CPU. No, it's like, that I think is the most frustrating thing. You don't want to deploy something into your client environment that makes the client environment worse. And so it's like, absolutely negligible irregardless of the piece of hardware that you put it on we've also the timing of the, like check-in and the way that we've kind of packetized the the data is all super super tight so it's only putting like tiny little bits of information out on a like five hour basis okay, now to give a full description of sas management in the shortest amount of time because some people would just think, oh, so to just tell me what SaaS apps are out there.

SaaS Visibility and Reporting Value

[6:26] No, it does a lot more than that. You showed me that I can, you know, start to do some forecasting with my clients. We can see not only what's in use, what's not in use if they're paying for something and not using it. So basically in Pro, the base feature that's included for like less than, well, 10 bucks a client, not per device, per client, is the ability to see all SaaS application usage across the entire environment, being able to track individual user access to that, number of sessions that they've had, number of time in application, and then see historical. We're tracking that and holding all of that data so you can see historical usage, which gives us the ability to track applications that are no longer in use as well. So then you can go back and if there's additional spend associated with that, there's like great cost-saving conversations with clients. And then any new applications that enter into the environment the ability to have that as part of your qbr, like this is the stuff that clients actually want to talk about in the qbr process and we haven't really had a tool other than some of the like very expensive like sas management tools or doing it through dns filter like is, the way to navigate that but all the reports are auto-created so it's kind of like.

[7:43] Parking back to the warranty master days which made.

[7:46] That the thing that made that product so good is you just like set up the integrations and then everything was done for you and all the reporting was automated right this is very similar it's like you just deploy the agent all the information is automated for you and then all the reporting is automated for you can just put it in front of your client and look like a superhero right okay so what drove this because i think the last conversation i had with scalepad was and i'll date it it's two years ago when brookley was there yeah and that was it and i haven't talked to anybody since we've just been hiding man we've been like we've been building in the shadows like the entire application's been completely revamped so like sas management's just one thing all of the like we did an acquisition of lci and there was a lot of like really rabid amazing lci partners like marnie and nick and alex the stuff that they built around that we've been slowly kind of trying to make like better version of what they kind of envisioned all of that's now in life cycle manager so all the ability to run assessments do comparables over time periods drive that into what we call initiatives where.

[8:53] Basically the same as opportunities sync those into your psa build out all of your road maps have your road maps directly go into budget have that deliverable stuff that i was showing you which builds like custom website with all your hero metrics so you can get away from that cutting and pasting to build your qbr all of that's in product now so it's it's moving really fast so that sounds great for life cycle management and the sas management now.

API-First AI Integration Roadmap

[9:19] I'll be honest when i've looked at all the other tools that you've bought in they're still kind of segmented yeah is there going to be a roadmap where kind of all that comes into a single dashboard yeah so this is what's been really interesting about like the back-end work that we've been doing so now the, like we're big believers and like everything needs to be open ecosystem everything's going to be ai enabled and so we need to make sure that we're supporting that with our product and so what we've been doing is basically going through and making sure that the entire kind of ui of our product is only kind of interacting with an api layer okay and so what that means is that we can now expose everything through mcp, and so life cycle manager is completely exposed through an mcp server now we just released that a couple months ago and so you can directly connect claude or whatever like other tools you're using and.

[10:10] Like right now, it's 80% of everything you can do in UI can be done through Claude. At the end of this month, it's 100% of everything. So the application completely becomes headless and you can do it through whatever the AI tools you want to use. But that also allowed us to build an AI agent directly into the product. So now you can do things like ingest Copilot or like your team's meetings through Microsoft Copilot and have that build out your entire roadmap for your client based off of conversations that you've had. Interesting. Yeah. So that's all this background work and all the integration work. But what that means for our existing products is that all of our products are going in that exact same direction. And so now we just launched ScalePad Copilot, which is our AI utility. That'll be cross product. And so it actually means that we don't really need to write integrations anymore. And so the path is really to just have like a completely headless system and have complete access, no matter how you want

MSP Feedback at Pax8 Beyond

[11:07] to access it or how you want to integrate with it. Okay. So how many people have you seen here at PAX 8 that were just like me? They're like, what? Every single, like, it's, it's, it's frustrating. It's like for us, we, we feel like we're building so much cool stuff. It's just.

[11:23] You know what it's like being an MSP? You get like bombarded with vendor stuff all the time and you have to try and filter through like who's just feeding me a line and who's actually building something cool. And so for us, the only real chance that we get is at events like this to just talk to everybody. So myself, Chris Day, everybody's just running around trying to have as many conversations as you can. Well, I will offer you this and I offer this to Brooke. And then when you guys have announcements, let me know. We'll talk about it.

[11:50] One because to be honest outside of a show yeah it's a podcast is really where i hear half the stuff and you know i did disclose to you earlier that i probably saw the announcement in the portal yeah and ignored it totally, it's we're so busy day to day and it's like that's what's so great about coming to events is that gives you a little bit of breathing room to like think creatively about your business and have the opportunity to to have these conversations that you just don't have in the day-to-day when you're just like underwater dealing with clients. Like I know what it is. I did it for 22 years. Like it's not an easy business to run.

Pricing and Included Features

[12:27] So here's the question that I don't, I don't know if anybody's asked you. I'm sure they've asked you in a roundabout way. You've added these features and you just said it's included. Like I, I, I don't, I don't know. I don't know what I pay. I'll be honest. But I know it hasn't been increased or anything. Yeah. You've just added this in. Yeah. How much did that hurt to add it in at no cost?
Yeah. I mean, we're, we're like, so like anybody that knows Chris knows that like. He wants to own an area. Like he's done it successfully with other products that he's had in the past with things like IT glue. And Chris is just adamant that the customer success.

[13:08] Component of the MSP industry needs to exist, and he wants ScaleCAD to be the ones that delivers that. And so.

[13:18] The conversations that we have right now are overwhelming value, is that we just want to make sure that everybody has access to this and that we can share it with everyone. And then the monetization, I think, really comes out through all the other things that we'll be doing around SaaS management. So 99% of what most MSPs want is just the visibility. But the ability to maybe block those applications or to tie those directly to integrations that track token spend or direct license utilization, those will be the things that we add into these things later to look at. And those will be add-on features that you could add later, but most MSPs just need disability into it. And you can't have an asset and lifecycle management tool without having the most important component of asset, which is the SaaS piece right now.

Why AI Vibe Coding Falls Short

[14:06] All right. Let me ask you the hard question. Everybody's talking about AI. A lot of techs are talking about Vibe coding their own stuff, bypassing vendors. I'm sure you've had conversations of somebody walking up to you with, oh, I can do that on my own. How do you kind of push back on that? Because I know that I've had conversations both with MSPs on air, off air. We've talked about the fact, well, why are you going to vibe code something? That may not work in three months if you plug in the wrong code. I think it's like, it's so tempting. Like, like I would be doing it if I like, if I'm running an MSP. But even within ScalePad, like we've got a ton of applications that like.

[14:47] It feels like sometimes SaaS companies exist to buy SaaS from other companies is the feeling. And so there's so many vibe coded applications that we've written that are in the scale pad to replace applications that we buy. And then what ends up happening to them is that they get immediately shelved. So there's like 50 or 60 dead applications that exist within scale pad, or we're like, oh, we could do this better. We could do this better. But it's like, that's not our core business.
Like our core business is writing lifecycle manager. And so we can't get distracted with all of these different paths. Like you can only do a certain number of things really well. And so we had a lot of conversations this week with MSPs that are vibe coding or have development teams that they're building out. And the ones that I think are approaching it really from a mature standpoint are, okay, what are the things that are going to be my differentiator? It's like writing another PSA going to be the thing that differentiates me from another MSP? No, like it's going to be a project that I'm going to end up spending all of my time on and not concentrating on what's going to make my business really important. And so I think the area that I would be looking at if I'm an MSP that's interested in Vibe coding is the interaction with the client and how my service delivery team is actually working, because that's the most important part of running an MSP. And so how does your service desk work? What access to information your technicians have? How do you start to automate your technician workflows? How do you start building in?

[16:12] Like standardization into what you're selling so that you can actually enable those automations like those are the things that if i was like spending time i would be focused on because that's the thing that's going to build differentiation for you not like.

[16:26] How do i deliver my qbr is not going to be a thing that's going to make someone choose, when now when i look in the product that i haven't looked at in a while yeah yeah i'd see the thing oh i can already do that stuff why do i need to spend my time trying to build 150 people working on that product right now like it's a huge team and they're all vibe coding and using ai development tools like it's really cool because like we all do it i do it all the time and then you go and you build something and you look at okay this is really cool i did that as an individual now imagine you have a team of professionals, like a team of 150 professionals that are doing that they can build stuff so

Upcoming CSAT and UI Refresh

[17:04] fast with such high quality that it's not worth trying to keep up with. All right. So this feels like, even though you said it's been out three months or so, it feels like you're announcing it as if it's a launch. Yeah. So what's next for you guys? Yeah. So what we feel is that like there's MSP tools for all is like the biggest thing that we hear from all of our partners and what we felt as we were scaling up. And so there's a lot of things that we think should be included in our, customer success platform and so you're going to see csat releasing soon so we'll have a full csat and i'll be honest explain that for people who don't know yeah yeah so customer satisfaction so the idea being like when you send a ticket out like a close notification the ability to track whether that was like a satisfactory.

[17:53] Interaction yeah exactly but then also mps so looking at net promoter score and being able to survey your clients on who's happy with you who's not but But we're also adding a bunch of other layers on top of that. So you'll have the ability to do custom type assessments through all the stuff that we would have loved to see in our CSAT tools as we were building our MSP. That's coming out in June. We've got a completely new UI refresh that's going into Lifecycle Manager to kind of modernize the interface. That's coming out at the end of the month. We've got an entire alignment module that's coming out in Q3, which allows us to actually track whitespace and do direct integration into agreements to track like additions and connect wise like should i be servicing this should i not where's my opportunity to grow within this client base there's all that coming out so the the product's going to be moving pretty pretty fast over the next little bit, so for people that have not logged into their scale pad portal like me uh get in there and turn these things on or even just call your account manager and ask for an updated demo like we've been working really hard, all of the customer-facing teams. I've been demo training every single one of them on the product every single week. We run a weekly session, so everybody should be able to walk you through the product. So just get online with your account manager and they'll walk you through all the stuff that we're building. Fantastic. Yeah. I'm shocked that we had not had this conversation earlier. Yeah.
Oh, it's the best kept secret in the MSP space right now, man.

[19:23] Well, it's not a secret anymore. And I'm going to be looking for you again, especially after some more stuff comes out. Dig my hand in the portal and see what else I'm missing. Yeah, sounds good. Thank you for coming by. Thank you for doing the quick mini demo

Signing Off from Salt Lake City

[19:37] before the show. Sounds good. And I look forward to more that's coming down the road. Yeah, thanks. All right, folks, that's it. Signing off here from Pax8Beyond 2026 in Salt Lake City. Next year, we'll be in San Diego. What do you think of San Diego? I don't know. I've never been there. You've never been there? I didn't travel much before I got into the vendor side. That's for sure. Okay. It'll be interesting.

[20:03] I know I've been to California, but I was a kid. My dad was in the Air Force. But I, of course, remember nothing. Yeah. You and I can go to maybe Disneyland together, Marv. I got Disney World in Florida. Fair. But we'll figure out something. Okay, cool. Thank you much, Ryan. And thank you folks for tuning in. We'll be back with more episodes of the IT Business Podcast on the regular show, the live show Wednesday nights at 8 p.m. Check everything out over at ITBusinessPodcast.com. And from PaxApeon on behalf of my good friend Rob Ray, thanks for hanging out. We'll see you soon. Holla!