Imagine employees began requesting various pieces of equipment like high-end tablets and specialty printers. They claimed the devices would make them more efficient and effective, so you made the investment. But a few months later, you noticed the equipment wasn’t being used. The expensive tablets sat forgotten inside desk drawers and the printers were rarely powered on. What would you do?
Chances are you’d round up all the unused equipment and sell it to recoup the loss. Or maybe you’d hold a training session to help employees learn how to use the devices to improve their work. But you certainly wouldn’t let expensive equipment go to waste.
So why do the same with your SaaS investments? If you’re not utilizing SaaS spend management, this could be exactly what’s happening.
If your business goal for 2017 was to reduce unnecessary spending, taking a closer look at your SaaS inventory is a great place to start. Especially since Gartner predicts SaaS and other cloud services will affect more than $1 trillion in IT spending by 2020. Here are three reasons you shouldn’t put off investing in a SaaS management solution:
1. Time Savings
If you needed to take inventory of all the SaaS licenses your company currently pays for, how would you begin? You could carefully examine accounts payable spreadsheets or monthly credit card statements and look for familiar charges. Or maybe you could round up the department managers and ask which software each team uses. But either way, there’s a good chance you’d overlook at least one product. And more importantly, generating a list of all your SaaS licenses would likely consume the better part of a workweek.
A SaaS spend management tool, however, eliminates the need to spend hours skimming payments and chasing down department heads. Instead, you can quickly view all SaaS expenses at-a-glance any time you need them.
2. Comprehensive Overview of SaaS Tools
Having an easily accessible snapshot of your SaaS subscriptions isn’t just a timesaver though. It can also help you avoid a few headaches, too.
For example, let’s say your company needed to undergo a security audit or apply for a compliance certification. Part of this process requires a close examination of any software products you use in order to rule out points of vulnerability.
As mentioned above, compiling a list of all the SaaS products used by each department within your organization can take a significant portion of time and likely won’t be comprehensive. Using these sorts of unreliable methods can affect compliance. Plus, you may be leaving tools and logins open to former employees — which opens your organization up to data breaches and other security risks.
IT Asset Management
It all starts with knowing what’s in your IT ecosystem. Flexera One discovers even the most elusive assets whether on-prem, SaaS, cloud, containers and more.
3. Smarter Spend
If you’re trying to save money at home, you’d likely create a budget and carefully track each purchase. Analyzing expenses also usually helps you pinpoint areas where you’re spending money unnecessarily — like an auto-renewing subscription service you forgot to cancel.
A SaaS spend management tool can do the same for your business. Given an average of 31 percent of SaaS licenses go unused, it’s likely there’s at least once SaaS license laying dormant within your organization. Identifying these types of expenses can help you reduce costs and keep more money in your tech budget for more critical purchases.
While SaaS spend management may not seem like a high priority investment for your company, it’s absolutely essential to helping your company run leaner and increase profitability. And because this tool can help you quickly determine where you’re wasting in a single glance, there’s no doubting its ROI.
