Three decades into SaaS, we still don’t have a way of easily managing who gets access to what. It’s even harder to know who’s actually using what they were provisioned. In addition to making the IT team’s work a lot harder, the mismanagement of permissioning comes with security threats, delays in access, and bloated license spend.
Traditionally, enterprise problems managing application provisioning and license management have been solved by products in three separate buckets: access control, privileged access management, and spend management. All three of these categories sat on the same set of data and did different things with it, and it was up to IT groups to manage cross-team communication ensuring the right hand knew what the left hand was doing. The cost? Security breaches (two out of three breaches involve privilege abuse), operational bottlenecks, and overspending on unnecessary licenses with no transparency into actual usage.
Enter Lumos. Identity and governance is broken in the cloud, and Lumos has developed the best solution for access management and has taken that initial product a dozen steps further. The founders took a ten thousand foot view and saw that if you’re going to use this dataset to solve one of the problems in initial application permissioning, why not solve for the whole lifecycle?
With Lumos, companies can not only manage identity and access in a centralized way, but also unify management of their SaaS applications. Easy management of access plus transparency into usage is more secure, a lot faster, and leads to cost savings, as teams are able to have visibility into SaaS usage, and deprecate or recycle licenses across their organization.
Customers like Chegg and Chargepoint are seeing the value across categories, making it an unusually successful example of a compound product.
Here’s why we are excited to invest in Lumos.
What Lumos does:
Access management is a hugely fragmented process. With more applications being used throughout enterprises than ever before (the average Lumos customer has 650 apps), IT groups are overwhelmed with requests. Oftentimes, SaaS approvals require multiple stakeholders, and approval workflows bog down IT and impede company productivity and security controls. The complexity of permissioning rules is also immense—in AWS alone, a company can have dozens of accounts, hundreds of roles, and thousands of permissions. Companies struggle with totally separate considerations around contract renewal and license management as well.
Lumos offers a single elegant solution to a complex, long-standing problem. Their platform both eliminates the headache of access management and provides transparency into access, licenses, contracts, and spend. Users can get access to what they need more quickly, and teams can easily make informed decisions around vendor management. Additionally, insight into spend benchmarks on an individual vendor basis can help procurement professionals ensure they are equipped with data for a cost-effective negotiation.
Why Lumos will win:
SaaS access management is a market that matters (and one we know really well): The proliferation of SaaS across the enterprise is both a clear and consistent trend over the last three decades. Growth in the market has been tremendous, and SaaS shows no signs of slowing down — it’s projected that companies will spend over $230B on SaaS in 2024 alone, up almost twofold from 2020.
Lumos is a consolidated offering: There’s value in all three of the markets Lumos is going after. We see startups all the time that address one of these problems well. But, as SaaS continues to take over enterprises, fragmented product offerings are becoming more of a problem than a solution. Products like Lumos that take one dataset and solve everything they can with it consolidate workflows in a way that will be even more important going forward.
Their holistic approach extends to AI: In addition to this powerful consolidation and visibility, Lumos is leveraging AI to automate workflows, detect anomalies to recommend access removal, and extract critical information from contracts to create a unified source of truth and make contract and license recommendations. Again, they have access to this trove of data, and they’re making the most of it.
Every part of their product works really well: The common concern about compound products is that they’ll solve many problems but not excel in any single one and not quite have a competitive edge relative to point solutions. Lumos has built best-of-breed functionality and achieved positive outcomes for customers across automation, security, compliance, and cost.
We find Lumos’s comprehensive product bundling for customers to be a key differentiator in a market whose importance is only continuing to grow. We’re eager to partner with Andrej and the team as they continue to scale their business.
