Why SaaS Cost Management Is Important for Organizations
Web applications often start free as the freemium model proved to be very successful for SaaS apps. Enterprise features such as team management, or high-volume transaction/data/usage are usually premium, paid features. Every employee with a credit card and every business unit with a budget is a potential silo of unnecessary or extensive license subscriptions. While procurement is rigorously purchasing high volume CRM, ERP, security and other productivity licenses, individuals lack the overview of all of the available licenses and tools that may benefit them. According to Gartner, buying licenses that overlap in functionality or extensive volumes because of no procurement controls may cost organizations up to 40-50% of their regular IT budgets.
Scirge provides an employee-level inventory of applications, along with the accounts created and accessed, and with usage statistics on the side. Central visibility allows procurement and IT decision-makers to see what type of services are being purchased extensively, so a managed solution can replace scattered individual usage. On top of the inventory, automatic workflows can be used to notify the relevant personnel if a certain application or account is not used anymore based on configurable thresholds.
60% of SaaS services are abandoned within two years, and this is a great thing, the newer the better (probably.) This means that central visibility over licensing should be on the to-do list of IT controllers, so they can optimize the number of accounts and overlapping tools. Sharing best practices also increases productivity, and with fewer and better applications, IT support overhead is likely to decrease. With central visibility and procedures, Shadow IT risks can be mitigated as well.
Read our related blog posts: