IT solutions provider CDW Corp. on Dec. 15 announced a partnership with Clearfind that will give its clients access to Clearfind’s automated enterprise software evaluation and consolidation platform.

The platform initially is being offered to CDW’s banking, pharmaceutical and manufacturing clients, but ultimately will be targeted to “all industries with complex software management needs,” according to New York-based Clearfind. Approximately 20% of an organization’s software typically is redundant, according to the company, and its solution analyzes and groups all software assets into categories of “review,” “consolidate” and “keep.”

Clearfind’s automated platform can do in minutes what would take consultants months to do manually, James Layfield, chief executive officer and co-founder, told Bank Automation News. “CDW’s banking clients particularly have responded very well to this [service], and we are going through onboarding,” he said.

Banking and financial services companies can make use of three key benefits, Layfield said:

1. Decreased security risk. Duplicative software means greater security risk for a business, and eliminating any unnecessary software helps to reduce that risk.
2. Streamlined data access. Software consolidation could help with multiple business intelligence (BI) tools accessing the same data and deriving variable metrics from it. “This will streamline your entire process,” Layfield said.
3. Reduced software costs. The Clearfind platform tracks and catalogs all of a company’s software functions, including obtaining input from employees. The information can be queried before adding new software solutions.

The platform can identify and manage more than 50,000 software products, Tara Barbieri, vice president of services orchestration at Lincolnshire, Ill.-based CDW, noted in the announcement.

Clearfind was founded in 2019 and has not yet held any funding rounds, according to Crunchbase. Competitors in the space include the New York-based Intello, which offers a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application discovery and optimization service and in February was acquired by cloud-based identity and access management solutions provider Sailpoint.

Boston-based Vendr similarly offers a SaaS application procurement optimization platform and has raised a total of $66 million in four funding rounds, according to Crunchbase.

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