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Important lessons in reducing waste SaaS license spend

James Sharp164 viewsReading Time: 2 minutes
Feb 28, 2024

How many wasted SaaS licenses does your company have? How much money can you save on them? Or do you not actually know…

These are two incredibly common questions that here at Uptrend Labs we get asked to resolve…

Software license provisioning is the responsibility of your company’s IT team and from my experience a task that is often overlooked due to conflicting priorities, overworked IT staff, and a lack of focus. Many companies, particularly those that have experienced significant M&A activity, often overlook this important optimization effort resulting in significant overspending on duplicate, shadow, and unused software. With the average annual app spend per employee being $15K the potential waste from unused and underutilized licenses alone can range from $5M–30M annually for organizations of 1,000–5,000 employees.

To provide some additional color on the scale of the potential problem, there are currently approximately 30,000 SaaS companies worldwide. The US has the largest proportion of SaaS companies (approximately 60%). Including repeat users, the US has around 50 billion SaaS customers. Salesforce has the largest SaaS market share at just under 10%, other familiar names in the US include Google Workplace, HubSpot, Adobe, Intuit, Slack, GitHub, and Zoom.
 
It is important to note that license provisioning is a fundamental aspect of SaaS management, helping businesses control access, manage costs,and maintain compliance with their software licensing agreements.It ensures that users have the right level of access to the SaaS application while providing

the SaaS provider with a means to manage and bill for their services. Hosted applications provide a further rich vein of license wastage, and are often overlooked as users migrate into SaaS platforms provided as concurrent resources.
While many tools exist to help uncover SaaS usage, in my next article I will discuss the seven critical activities a company needs to be focused on to optimize their SaaS software use and licensing.

At Uptrend labs, we have the depth of understanding and the technological know-how to guide you through the complexities of selecting, managing and optimizing your SaaS and hosted applications. Contact us to discover a new kind of collaboration, a new kind of approach to technology, and business, and of course,  the best practices for ensuring your organization’s technology platforms are best in class.

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