Gorillas' SaaS Visibility & Automation Support Lightning-Fast Growth at Scale

Customer Profile

Gorillas is an instant, on-demand delivery startup that is disrupting the industry. With a mission to create immediate access to essential needs, the company promises delivery in minutes from grocery cart to customer location. Users of the Gorillas app can access more than 2,000 essential items at retail prices.

Founded in 2020, the company has more than 14,000 employees in 55 cities, 9 European countries, and the US. It reached a $1 billion valuation in its first year of business.

Challenges

When Bobby Abdullah joined Gorillas in 2021 as its first full-time IT hire, the company already had almost 2,000 employees. The HR team had been responsible for creating new accounts for business-critical SaaS applications. It took 10-20 minutes to manually provision each employee. Because Gorillas was growing at lightning speed, HR didn’t have the capacity to handle everyone, so newly onboarded employees needed to receive accounts without negatively affecting HR capacity.

There was also no centralized mechanism for monitoring what SaaS apps the company had, who was using them, and which licenses were under-utilized. As a result, Abdullah felt sure Gorillas was wasting time and overspending on its licenses.

“The only way to gather the information we needed about employees and their apps was by speaking with their managers and colleagues. With so many people joining every day – 6,000 employees just in the last year – it was an impossible task,” said Abdullah, IT Projects & Governance Gorillas.

Why Gorillas Chose Torii

Fortunately for Gorillas, Abdullah had experienced similar challenges at one of his former employers, where he conducted extensive research into solutions that could solve them. He said, “I quickly figured out Gorillas needed a SaaS Management Platform (SMP) to handle app discovery, onboarding, offboarding, and license and contract management. Within two weeks of working here, I recommended we purchase Torii.”

According to Abdullah, Torii’s discovery capabilities were superior. “Torii’s discovery is one of its most important features. Its browser extension technology enables us to find every tool we have, even ones HR and IT didn’t provision,” he said. “Torii doesn’t lie. It tells you exactly who is logged in to which applications, what type of users they are, and the amount we’re spending on the license. Having 100% accurate data puts us ahead of the game when it comes to managing SaaS.”

Abdullah was also attracted by Torii’s rich automation, which is one of the platform’s key differentiators. “Torii’s granular and flexible automation for onboarding, offboarding, and license management exceeded my high expectations. We can customize workflows on many levels that make sense for us, such as warehouse or headquarters, department, group, timing, or any other dataset. Other tools don’t offer these capabilities.”

He summed up his decision to go with Torii this way: “To me, Torii is the most mature SaaS management platform on the market. It has superior discovery, automation, and integrations, plus its customer success and support teams are amazing. Together, they make for the best SMP offering.”

How Torii Helps Gorillas

Drives Collaboration and Savings

Gorilla’s ability to monitor all SaaS apps and how they’re being used in real-time makes it easier for IT to collaborate with other departments. “The information Torii surfaces helps put everyone on the same page, focusing on the right problems,” Abdullah explained. “The workflows make sure teams work together efficiently and that things don’t fall through the cracks. The reports give everyone from IT and security to legal and HR key data they need to effectively do their jobs.”

Abdullah estimated that Gorillas’s IT team easily saved thousands of hours because of Torii. “Torii does the onboarding, offboarding, license, and contract management work on its own. This saves us a lot of time and allows IT to focus on other priorities, like optimizing governance,” he said.

Eliminated SaaS Management Help Desk Tickets

Before Torii, about 20-30% of Gorillas’ help desk tickets were related to onboarding and offboarding hardware and software, and handling license management. As the number of employees skyrocketed, help desk tickets also exploded – from about 200 to 14,000 tickets.

However, after Torii, significantly less was related to software. “We rarely receive any tickets for onboarding or offboarding core employee SaaS accounts anymore. Torii eliminated those problems,” said Abdullah.

Easily Onboards Employees at Scale

Gorillas deployed Torii’s onboarding and offboarding workflows about a month after using the solution. The results were immediate. “As soon as onboarding was set, half my scope changed. Torii automatically did everything that I was doing manually. Onboarding is now standardized and streamlined. Everything is triggered through integration with our HR Management System. People get the apps they need right away with the right permissions,” Abdullah said.

This is especially important as Gorillas continues to scale. According to Abdullah, “Gorillas was growing at a crazy pace. Torii enabled us to stay on top of things as we scaled. It helps us keep employees happy and productive.”

Gorillas is about to add about 10,000 more of their employees into Torii. Abdullah has no qualms, though, since he knows their app onboarding, and offboarding, will go smoothly.

De-risks SaaS Application and Data Access

Now that offboarding employees who leave Gorillas is triggered through the HRMS, access to all core tools as well as to unsanctioned apps that are connected to known apps is automatically shut off.

According to Abdullah, “Company data shouldn’t be available to people who leave. With Torii, we’re able to virtually eliminate this risk. This makes our legal team very happy. Plus, we save significant time by eliminating the 10-20 minutes previously spent manually offboarding each employee from known applications.”

Saves Money through License & Contract Management

When Gorillas turned Torii on, they instantly found hundreds of licenses that were assigned but unused. “Right away, we saved thousands of euros every month without any effort by eliminating those licenses,” said Abdullah.

They also discovered many duplicate tools. Abdullah commented, “Torii helped us rationalize our apps by identifying redundant tools and comparing usage. We then polled users to find out which top 5 apps were fan favorites and eliminated counterparts that weren’t.”

Gorillas leveraged real-time app usage and cost-per user data to right-size licenses. And with Torii workflows that alert app owners 90 days in advance of renewals, they have enough time to process the data and renegotiate vendor contracts.

Abdullah explained, “We were able to communicate all this information to the right stakeholders and tell them what cost-saving measures to take. This saved Gorillas hundreds of thousands of euros in software and licenses for the first fiscal year.”