SaaS management, M&A, and AI: Our time on theCUBE with Rentokil Initial CIO
April 15, 2025
2 minute read
Last week, our CEO, Jesse Levin, had the pleasure of speaking with Rentokil Initial CIO (BetterCloud customer), Mark Purcell, on theCUBE podcast with Rob Strechay for Google Cloud Next 2025.
This discussion dove deep into the complexities of SaaS management, its role in accelerating time to value for mergers and acquisitions (M&A), and the burgeoning role of AI.
Let’s dive into some of the key topics.
Addressing the SaaS management challenge
Organizations face the daunting task of managing a multitude of SaaS applications and user accounts, necessitating powerful tools for visibility and control.
As SaaS management is no longer confined to IT departments and AI resurfaces the same challenges, organizations must prioritize a unified platform to address governance and software investment challenges.
BetterCloud provides a solution by offering a platform that simplifies SaaS management, especially within Google Workspace. This platform empowers IT teams to optimize costs and mitigate risks effectively.
Rentokil Initial’s strategic use of BetterCloud
Rentokil Initial, a global leader in pest control and hygiene operating in 89 countries with a vast workforce of 68,000+, relies on BetterCloud to streamline administration, enhance security, and empower regional IT teams.
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I could not imagine now, a world where we didn’t have BetterCloud managing our environment because it just gives us that full transparency.”
– Mark Purcell, CIO of Rentokil
This is particularly crucial during their frequent M&A activities. The platform’s ability to provide deep insights into acquired instances and facilitate seamless migrations has been invaluable, most notably during the large-scale integration of Terminix. Averaging between 40 to 50 acquisitions per year, this seamless migration is critical to accelerating acquisition time to value.
One of the largest acquisitions that Rentokil completed in the last couple of years was the acquisition of Terminix in North America where it onboarded and integrated 13,000 users. That integration planning involved the transition of the Terminix business from its Office 365 environment to Google Workspace. Rentokil used the BetterCloud platform to get a really good insight into the existing Office 365 environment and migrated all users over the course of two weekends.
“It was one of the smoothest migrations that we could have completed and it was all down to the planning and the use of BetterCloud in our ability to understand what we were actually going to be migrating,” said Purcell. “It was a huge success for us and that was recognized by our board for just how well that was executed with BetterCloud at the heart of what we were doing.”
AI’s impact and the future of SaaS management
We’re seeing AI quickly aggravate the SaaS management challenges of yesterday: SaaS sprawl, SaaS security, and SaaS spend.
As organizations continue to invest in AI, many are using SaaS management tools to maintain governance requirements and fund new AI initiatives. With insights on usage and costs of their existing applications, organizations can free up spend to redirect the spend on new AI investments.
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The growth in AI computing power and LLM efficacy is quickly making agentic AI also a reality that will add another layer of transformation to SaaS management and another layer of opportunity for IT.”
– Jesse Levin, BetterCloud CEO
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