How Malwarebytes uses Workato wall-to-wall, automating processes and scaling up IT to keep pace with the business

Bill VanderWall, Malwarebytes Business Applications VP, needed to solve for the company’s biggest hurdle to success - data silos. Teams had to reinvent the wheel each time they needed to leverage data and would manually organize data per project or request.

Information required for financial and accounting functions were siloed in disparate systems, which led to a departmental approach of adding technologies as the business scaled. As a result, high-volume tasks remained manual, lengthy, and incredibly burdensome. Unless the siloed data was unified, Malwarebytes would need additional staff.

Malwarebytes’ data warehouse didn’t collect all the information needed to support hypergrowth. It offered operational product-usage insights, but the finance team needed to tie those to revenue, bookings or other customer insights.

In the current state, contract renewals, software upgrades and usage-based billing couldn't be efficiently mined because processes required too much human interaction.

VanderWall set out to establish a curated data store supported by Snowflake. Using Workato’s exchange-load-transform technology, he orchestrated disparate SaaS, ecommerce and internal systems, feeding all info to Snowflake, resulting in a centralized and productive architecture. Still, VanderWall’s team found even more ways for Workato to add value. Use cases evolved around automating contract renewals, software upgrades and QA.

Today, more than 100 Workato recipes are in use at Malwarebytes, automating previously labor-intensive, manual work.

Usage-based billing alone provided substantial efficiency gains because it initially required six to seven people working over two weeks to gather all the required information, but now takes only two people two days.

While that was a welcome accomplishment, it was almost an unintended consequence of engaging Workato. As a result of the original scope, Malewarebytes was able to generate a new Top 10 list of CFO metrics.

Malwarebytes was then able to analyze previously unavailable strategic insights, and those insights led to new revenue. Once the siloed data was unified in one warehouse and generated reports that were digestible to the finance team, it wasn’t long before new business opportunities were realized.

Contract auto-renewal, for example, has increased customer lifetime values while reducing customer acquisition costs. Per-seat licenses are automated and trackable, and now upgrading software agreements can be performed without human touch.

Ultimately, VanderWall needed a package to mass-import data and another to move it. “We were hoping to find one tool that could do both,” VanderWall says. “We weren't sure if that really existed, but as we looked at the tools that were out there and available, we found Workato.”