Case Study February 2, 2026
Replacing an Expensive SaaS Solution with a Custom Cloud App
Trexin slashed more than $100k in annual software license expenses by developing its own professional service automation (PSA) software.
Business Driver
As an early adopter and proponent of cloud computing and Software as a Service (SaaS) value propositions, Trexin was a longtime customer of FinancialForce (later renamed Certinia) and licensed its PSA solution built atop the Salesforce Platform. Over time, Trexin’s satisfaction from an economics perspective eroded due to increasing subscription rates; rigid, linearly-scaled, per-seat licensing structures; and Trexin’s own growth in headcount requiring PSA user licenses. Seeking to increase Trexin’s operating margin by reducing its IT/digital spend, Trexin’s leadership reviewed its SaaS cost-benefit analyses and decided to build a lower-cost, internally developed alternative.
Approach
Using the same digital consulting expertise that Trexin offers its Clients, Trexin began this effort with a Strategy, Assessment, and Roadmap (STAR) to clarify the business goal, establish a clear strategy to reach that goal, envision the future-state capabilities needed to execute the strategy, conduct a gap analysis of the future-state capability needs against the current state, and define a sequenced, prioritized set of actions to enhance its capabilities. At a high level, the business goal and strategy encapsulated three overarching themes:
• Significantly lowering Trexin’s total cost of ownership for professional service automation
• Equaling or bettering Trexin’s existing PSA features/functionality
• Limiting internal tech support requirements by continuing to leverage a cloud ecosystem
Given this context, Trexin’s engineers adopted an innovative solution architecture leveraging Trexin’s existing investment in the Microsoft 365 cloud platform for email and collaboration to build an entirely new custom application using Microsoft PowerApps and a SharePoint-based data store. Designed specifically to incur no additional M365 licensing costs, Trexin developed a sophisticated 50-screen canvas app featuring Web- and mobile-user interfaces, direct integration with M365 for identity & access management, and full cloud-based deployment.
Results
Within three months after starting development, Trexin was able to deploy into production a replacement system that not only matched but also significantly enhanced Trexin’s PSA capabilities. Intentionally timed to coincide with its SaaS contract renewal deadline, Trexin was able to immediately terminate its SaaS subscription. And because of the innovative architectural approach that was used, Trexin did not incur any additional M365 license fees and was able to recapture 100% of the annual SaaS expense it had previously been paying.
