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ITAM and Strategic Operations at Wix

Lars Kamp

ITAM is an established category in the IT market, with its own Gartner Magic Quadrant.

Gartner defines ITAM as "[providing] an accurate account of technology asset lifecycle costs and risks to maximize the business value of technology strategy, architecture, funding, contractual and sourcing decisions." ITAM is usually divided into two subcategories, SAM and HAM.

With cloud computing and SaaS tools, the requirements for ITAM have changed.

In the old world of IT, there was tight control over who could purchase servers and software licenses. IT was a (literal) gatekeeper that determined who could push a new server into a rack and provision that server with software.

That control is gone in today's world, where developers and employees have the flexibility to swipe a credit card or push a button in a console to "procure" cloud resources and software.

There are, of course, benefits of giving employees flexibility—namely, "development velocity", the speed to build and launch new products.

A challenge remains to optimize the value of these infrastructure expenditures, however, which means balancing "development velocity" and "business velocity." Without balance, the result is tool and infrastructure sprawl, as well as out-of-control spending. Decentralized procurement may sound great on paper, but usually leads to the "worst best deal."

Balancing business with development velocity is Amit Mizrahi's job as Head of Strategic Operations at Wix.

Wix's flagship product is their free website builder, around which they've also built a portfolio of e-commerce products. The Wix company mantra is "to measure everything," and Amit's work includes measuring the ROI on Wix's IT assets—a tall order when Wix's employees number nearly 6,000.

In this episode, Amit walks us through how he built an ITAM program at Wix from scratch. The ITAM program is part of the "Value & Impact Center of Excellence at Wix," which has two pillars:

  1. ITAM: Managing procurement and operations for everything related to SaaS products and tools within Wix.

  2. FinOps: An organizational function that is in charge of monitoring cloud activities, governing cloud spending, and educating teams on financial-driven KPIs. (See Episode 5: Shifting From FinOps to Financial Engineering.)

To understand the business value of tools, Amit and his team built an internal data integration and analytics layer that extracts usage data from all tooling—an abstraction across Wix's IT assets. This abstraction layer is coupled with procurement processes that create alignment between development and business velocity for Wix.

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