Why SMP Adoption is Slow

I noticed a recent trend

Five of our last six new customers came from spreadsheets.

To be fair, this isn’t new, it’s the normal. But it still struck me as important.

This was during a recent call at Torii, a number of new customers had just signed and someone called out specifically that five of the six were coming from a SaaS management process that relied entirely on one person updating a spreadsheet.

Is this a critical mass moment?

We’ve seen some recent consolidation in the SMP market with vendors like Productiv shutting down. And yet, the SMP landscape is only growing.

In 2025, Gartner claimed that “Through 2028, over 70% of organizations will centralize SaaS application management using a SaaS management platform (SMP), an increase from less than 30% in 2025.”

Adoption of SMPs is growing, and in 2026, it’s actually accelerating as more and more companies struggle to manage AI alongside SaaS.

So why has it taken so long?

Nobody owns the problem.

If most teams have not bought a tool for this, the question worth asking is why not. It is not that the tools are bad or that nobody cares. It is that the SaaS stack belongs to no single person.

Think about who touches it. IT, finance, security, procurement, and department heads each hold a piece of it. multiple owners, multiple priorities, and no one whose job title says “the software estate is mine.” A problem nobody clearly owns is a purchase nobody is clearly assigned to make.

Everything else about the slow adoption hangs off that. The spreadsheet is free, it is already open, and it mostly works right up until the renewal nobody caught. That renewal will not send a calendar invite, and the sheet is not going to volunteer that a seat quietly renewed for another year. When our offboarding conversations turn to the manual state, the way people put it is plain: “the list is only as good as the last time someone updated it”. That is not a complaint about a tool. It is the honest ceiling of a shared sheet that four teams half-maintain.

“SaaS management” is also young enough that most teams do not yet expect it as a budget line or a slot on the org chart.

So no, you’re not late to SaaS management… yet

If you’re still updating that spreadsheet by hand; bless you.

You’re keeping things on track, trying to monitor adoption, track spend, inventory the un-inventoriable, and anticipate the new surprise renewal. It’s not just hard work, it’s impossible in the modern workplace.

We say it all the time, but SaaS Management requires cross team collaboration. Not a single hero, but a structured effort that comes from the top. Now, in a world of shadow IT and rampant AI adoption, that effort of managing your software is more important than ever.