Looking to take steps towards optimizing your spend on SaaS applications? Read all three articles in this series:
• 4 Ways To Reduce SaaS Spend By 35% Or More <<< You’re here now
• How Procurement Can Eliminate Surprise SaaS Renewals
• How to Reduce Your SaaS Operations Cost
Let’s cut to the chase—you need to cut costs. It’s a top priority, thanks to looming inflation and recession fears.
If you want to cut costs, not headcount, you need to consider areas where your organization’s spending may be less than optimized. According to ITAM Review, 35% of spending on SaaS applications at most organizations is wasted. So how can you target that 35% and save costs?
Depending on your current IT spend management strategy—it’s a task that’s easier said than done. The current state of SaaS makes it incredibly difficult to track and monitor.
SaaS adoption and ownership is so decentralized that cost-cutting collaboration between IT, Procurement, and Finance is a complicated series of questions without answers. That’s primarily because SaaS spending is largely in the dark.
That means that even if an organization acknowledges wasted spend sitting beneath the shadows of their SaaS stack, they may not be able to act on it. While that may be frustrating, it’s not hopeless.
First, we must understand the four ways waste takes hold at an organization.
- Unused Applications
- Unused & Underutilized Licenses
- Duplicate & Redundant Licenses
- Shadow IT
We’ll explore each one and address how you can save over a third of your SaaS budget without altering the value SaaS provides to your organization.
Unused Applications
Every company adds SaaS applications—to the tune of 15-20 new apps every month. But they are less adept at cutting those apps after they’ve served their purpose.
Every application seems like a great idea upon adoption, but those you continue to utilize will engrain themselves into your workflow. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case for every application—leading to some going unused. Those applications start gathering digital dust—and wasted cost.
That’s where a SaaS Management Platform can help.
For example? The Torii Platform automatically provides real-time, accurate usage data for all sanctioned and unsanctioned applications. By leveraging this data, you can oversee how employees utilize applications and target unused applications for cost-cutting. The Torii Platform will even provide recommendations for offboarding applications it notices have infrequent usage over time.
Unused & Underutilized Licenses
“License and registration, please.” Anyone pulled over by police for a traffic violation knows that demand. Similar to digging through glove compartments to find them when asked, SaaS licenses can also get lost in the shuffle.
There are many reasons for this. Maybe an employee left your organization and was never fully offboarded. Maybe assigned users never actually used the licenses they received. Maybe a user was assigned a more expensive tier of license that their role doesn’t require.
Whatever the reason, licenses can sometimes get left behind or underutilized– often without anyone realizing it. Those licenses represent unnecessary SaaS spend eating your budget and hurting your ROI.
The Torii Platform streamlines the process of identifying unused and underutilized licenses. By automatically surfacing all license information into one central place—and drilling down into how often each person uses each license and when they last used it—IT, Finance, and Procurement teams can make informed decisions on actions to take. That includes automatically harvesting that data consistently.
With that active level of information, you can use the Torri Platform’s workflow engine to notify the end user (and their manager) that their license will be downgraded or removed unless there’s a strong reason otherwise provided.
Duplicate & Redundant Applications
Thanks to decentralized ownership of applications, it’s common for multiple individuals or groups to purchase the same application or application type without any communication. Similar to grocery shopping without knowing what’s in your pantry, when application adoption is occurring outside the purview of IT (or anyone else, for that matter)—redundancy is expected. With Shadow IT hiding the cost of existing applications, this can be a lot more expensive than an extra can of corn.
Suddenly, there are multiple project management applications being used across your organization, all with their own set of licenses—all adding cost and complexity to the way your organization works. It’s time to open the pantry before making your shopping list.
The Torii Platform provides detailed application usage data on a per-employee basis. That includes identifying when an employee may have licenses for two applications that are similar in purpose. This becomes powerful when comparing applications to identify those that may be declining or growing in usage. It enables you to target redundant apps and licenses to eliminate them accordingly.
Shadow IT
Shadow IT is spooky to most IT professionals. That’s understandable.
After all, IT can’t manage what it can’t see. This problem is magnified from a cost savings perspective. Without visibility into what apps are used, it’s impossible to have an accurate picture of SaaS spend.
One of the most powerful ways the Torii Platform can help you optimize spend is by giving you a holistic view of all your spend on both sanctioned and unsanctioned apps. This is accomplished by leveraging accurate and extensive real-time Discovery. Our customers often find they have 3x more apps than they realized—many of which are auto-renewing without anyone knowing about it.
By shining a light on Shadow IT, you’re shining a light on SaaS spend. From there, you can optimize spend, even if it’s hiding in a team budget, orphaned app, or expense account.
Using The Right Tools To Reduce SaaS Spend
SaaS spend management feels impossible without the right tools and visibility. Fortunately, through the capabilities of a SaaS Management Platform (SMP), you can save on spend you may not even be aware is going to waste.
Imagine taking a meeting with your executive leadership and being able to declare that through your SMP’s capabilities and cross-functional collaboration, you’ve saved your organization as much as $1.7 million as a recession approached. Easy to imagine how that would come across? No need to imagine it—see how our customer Hired felt about accomplishing that exact feat.
Are you ready to reduce your SaaS spend by 35%? Request a demo and see how the Torii Platform can help you get there.
