How Vespa.ai put software access
into a shared company system

Vespa.ai builds search and recommendation infrastructure at serious scale, with customers including Perplexity, Spotify and Yahoo. A relatively small team supports that work, and its employees rely on a growing portfolio of software to do it. As a SOC 2 compliant company, Vespa.ai also needs access decisions to remain accurate and reviewable as the company grows.

Vespa.ai already has a working process. It uses dedicated virtual payment cards to pay for software and IAM software to manage identities and devices. Employees submit requests through Google Forms or speak directly with administrators, who grant access through each product's admin portal, while a spreadsheet records the company's software overview. The difficulty is keeping the overview updated as requests, decisions and follow-up move between people and systems.

A classic IT helpdesk or issue-tracking system with defined workflows would be the typical solution to this problem. Unfortunately, these generic solutions require a significant investment of time and customization to avoid feeling like overkill or being complicated for employees to use. Founder and CTO Frode Lundgren would rather have engineers focus on what is core to the company—not customizing issue-tracking systems.

A combination of Google Forms and a spreadsheet has done the job so far, but it does not scale well for a growing company. Employees want an easy way to see which software they can request, managers need to be involved in determining the business need for a particular product, and everyone wants access granted as quickly as possible while keeping an auditable record of the decisions made. Managing this with the current process is highly manual. Each interruption is small, but together they make a routine process dependent on one person keeping the full overview. Vespa.ai wants the context to remain available to everyone involved, without replacing the systems its administrators already use to grant access to the various services.

Toolbar's role is to keep access decisions and the work that follows connected. Whether an employee requests a product or an administrator assigns it directly, both routes create the same record, which tracks the access through approval and completion.

Requests, assignments and removals all update the same record. Employees can follow their requests, while Vespa.ai can see the history, status and responsible person for each item. This keeps the software overview updated through the workflow, without requiring the same information to be maintained separately in a spreadsheet. As a purpose-built tool for this workflow, Toolbar works out of the box without weeks of customization to fit Vespa.ai's requirements.

Access that made sense when it was granted may no longer be right as people and responsibilities change. Vespa.ai's managers review employee access each quarter so the overview reflects what employees need now, not only what they needed when access was first approved. Toolbar supports those decisions with access and ownership data captured through everyday software administration.

When a manager decides that access should be removed, Toolbar keeps the resulting task connected to the review until the administrator responsible for the product completes it. Vespa.ai can see that the review led to a completed change, not only that the review took place.

Software access arrives as a stream of small decisions rather than one large project. Nobody at Vespa.ai spends all day in this process, which is precisely why it can be mentally expensive. Returning to a request means remembering what was decided, whether someone acted on it and what still needs attention.

Frode can return after working on something else and see what needs a decision, whether a manager has validated the business reason for each request, what is still being completed and what has already been reviewed. He no longer has to reconstruct the state of the work before he can move it forward.

The result is a cleaner overview, where responsibility can move between an employee, manager and administrator without the request losing its history between systems. As Vespa.ai adds employees and software, the process becomes easier to share.