How Cogna builds smarter software without the sprawl

As an IT leader in a critical industry, you have a clear goal: maintain a lean, well-organized tech stack that supports productivity, security, and stability. But when a core system lags, teams often cut corners and onboard tools outside your oversight, undermining your standards.

These "quick fix" apps may solve short-term needs, but quickly create operational blind spots and increase the risk of security breaches.

What if you could maintain comprehensive IT supervision, ensure compliance, and consolidate scattered workflows — without playing catch-up with shadow tools?

Cogna is built for this exact purpose.

This blog post breaks down how Cogna's proprietary AI-powered platform builds custom software that helps eliminate sprawl — helping ensure efficient, centralized IT infrastructure.

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Why SaaS sprawl costs you more than you think

Efforts to centralize operations on platforms like SAP, Databricks, or Snowflake — or by building a proprietary system — help unify core processes and data. But even with these strategies, system breakdowns and tricky integration points can still erode efficiency, mainly because standardized platforms aren't built for the messy, real‑world edge cases.

This mismatch creates several sprawl-related challenges:

• Wasted spend: Without a centralized procurement strategy, teams routinely pay premium rates, purchase overlapping tools, and lose track of auto-renewals. Even worse, companies with SaaS-heavy stacks use fewer than half their licensed tools — and only 20% of features for the ones they do use. Plus, as usage expands, vendors often raise prices.
• Diverted resources: True costs often emerge later — when IT teams must scramble to connect, integrate, or reconcile shadow IT systems introduced without oversight. Instead of focusing on strategic initiatives, IT is stuck building custom APIs, reconciling data schemas, and purchasing third-party connectors.
• Data silos and visibility gaps: As disparate tools proliferate, customer, regulatory, and operational data become trapped in isolated systems. To coordinate, teams run manual, error-prone data exports, creating competing sources of truth that fuel confusion, duplicate effort, and delay decisions.
• Security and compliance risks: As data spreads across multiple tools, visibility is limited — making it difficult to track personnel data access and verify compliance with security standards like GDPR and HIPAA.
• Increased maintenance and management burdens: When issues arise, a lack of centralized oversight means IT spends even more time tracking down the source and coordinating fixes across disconnected systems. When IT is stuck putting out fires, internal initiatives stall.‍
• Misalignment with business needs: Off-the-shelf tools — designed for generic use cases — force teams to adapt their workflows and depend on vendors for changes, making it increasingly difficult to stay agile when business priorities or opportunities evolve.

The result is a tech stack that drains resources and momentum at every level, making it harder to move the business forward.

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How Cogna turns complex tech stacks into streamlined systems

Where SaaS sprawl creates blind spots, Cogna builds unified visibility.

• Purpose-built software: Cogna's tailored solutions combine multiple core capabilities into one platform, enabling you to retire redundant tools and eliminate wasteful spending.
• Seamless integration: Because solutions are crafted from operational input, they're designed to fit naturally into existing platforms and data sources. Information flows where needed, making cross-team collaboration and decision-making more effective.
• IT governance: By co-building with your IT team, Cogna gives them full control over every tool's security standards, data access, and system architecture. This approach ensures operational requirements are addressed with specialized features, preventing shadow IT.
• Agile delivery: Cogna delivers fully functional solutions in weeks, so teams realize value and efficiency gains almost immediately.
• Ongoing optimization: As business priorities shift, solutions are quickly tailored to evolving needs, helping teams maintain alignment and momentum without long waits or disruption. Throughout the license, Cogna manages hosting, updates, and enhancements — without costly change requests — so your tech never falls behind.
• Risk and compliance management: By reducing data silos and tightening integration, Cogna limits compliance blind spots while embedding robust, enterprise-level safeguards into every solution.
• Flexible deployment: Cogna delivers the same speed and stability whether you need to temporarily fill gaps or completely transform critical operations.

With Cogna, you only pay when solutions deliver results — so every dollar drives measurable value and reduces SaaS waste.

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Ready to take full control of your tech stack?

Organizations across critical industries already use Cogna to eliminate SaaS sprawl, unify their data, and unlock significant operational gains.

Take Cadent Gas — with Cogna, they transformed their gas management and procurement operations. Cogna unified over 50 years of data on gas leaks from across different systems into a single application and consolidated relevant procurement data in one place. The impact was immediate — and substantial: £11M in annual cost savings.

As the Cadent team noted, "Cogna's platform simplifies the integration of data across different business areas and gives experts the ability to drive analysis, optimizations, and decisions that deliver vast improvements."

Want to streamline operations with full IT control? Let's talk.