• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

My TechDecisions

  • Best of Tech Decisions
  • Topics
    • Video
    • Audio
    • Mobility
    • Unified Communications
    • IT Infrastructure
    • Network Security
    • Physical Security
    • Facility
    • Compliance
  • RFP Resources
  • Resources
  • Podcasts
  • Project of the Week
  • About Us
    SEARCH
IT Infrastructure, News

How to Spring Clean Your SaaS Apps – and Find New Savings

Cleaning out your SaaS stack can lead to significant cost savings, as most organizations don't realize they have SaaS clutter and spending issues.

May 18, 2023 Uri Haramati Leave a Comment

SaaS Apps, SaaS stacks, squeegee cleaning a dirty window, spring cleaning concept, blue sky
OFC Pictures / stock.adobe.com

As “Spring Cleaning” comes to an end, stop and ask yourself — did you consider your SaaS applications?

Many organizations are looking to trim their budgets. With that in mind, cleaning out your SaaS stack is a great place to focus. It can be like finding change under the couch cushion (except the totals can add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars). Most organizations don’t even realize they have SaaS clutter (and spend) problems. According to Gartner, organizations have over 125 different SaaS applications, costing them on average $1,040 per employee annually.

You can’t save without seeing your full stack

You wouldn’t clean your house in the dark. The same principle applies to your SaaS stack. The process of transforming SaaS sprawl to SaaS savings requires visibility. You can’t optimize what you can’t see.

This is especially relevant as shadow IT is an ongoing challenge. Shadow IT are unsanctioned applications that employees purchase, or get for free, without making their IT team aware. As tech-savvy generations enter the workforce, apps are easier to sign up for and start using, and expenses are easier to submit — shadow IT continues to increase and wreak havoc on budgets and more. We found that 75% of CIOs believe their inability to identify wasted SaaS spend is a threat to their company’s success.

Combating the risk and cost that come with Shadow IT requires discovering every single application currently or previously in use at an organization. Once you’re able to see every application, it’s that much easier to pinpoint redundancies, understand every single place your IT spend is going, and pinpoint waste and risk.

Related: Is a Reliance on Cloud, SaaS Apps Leading to Shadow IT?

Going beyond discovery

Visibility doesn’t end there, though. No different than how you’d know a particular room will require more cleaning due to its usage, application usage is equally important.

Understanding the usage of applications at your organization, in real-time, makes it easy to see where licenses are underutilized or abandoned. This is critically important as you undertake the process of application rationalization (more on that next).

Usage alone will also only get you so far. Your team needs to have an easy way to understand the cost of each application to compare against that usage. How much is each license costing your company, and is that cost justified by how often it’s used?

Some tools, such as SaaS management platforms, have a solution for this problem. By integrating with each application, including financial systems such as Netsuite, they automatically pull usage and cost into one, centralized location. This real-time, single source of truth makes it easy to compare the total cost against the usage.

What is application rationalization?

With all of your SaaS information centralized and easily accessible, you can leverage it to make data-driven decisions. That’s important, as 73% of CIOs say their organization does not have a strategic framework for evaluating app rationalization and license usage.

Application rationalization, put simply, is an evaluation process for applications. It helps IT understand what apps to keep, cease, or expand in usage. It’s like going through your home and deciding which clothes and clutter you’re ready to get rid off.

In practice, it’s a multi-step process that leverages the information you’ve gathered to make educated decisions to save costs and reduce redundancies across your organization.

How to use data to compare applications

This involves finding the difference between widely used applications and applications used rarely or by small groups of employees. Once you have the required information on usage rates and license amounts, savings opportunities will reveal themselves. It’s also important to understand the purpose of applications and how they’re used by respective teams to ensure that you’re not cutting impact along with cost.

Some solutions make this process easy, grouping applications by their type and purpose. Maybe you’re paying for two similar project management applications, such as Monday and Asana. Viewing the usage of each one side-by-side lets your IT team see which app is used more often, compare their costs, and helps you come to a data-driven decision on which application to cut.

How to optimize SaaS application licenses

No different than those old t-shirts in the back of your closet, application licenses can quickly grow dust if not used efficiently. Except, in the case of these licenses, that dust is an added cost for your organization.

Another important part of application rationalization involves license management. Rather than buying a new wardrobe every season, let’s up-cycle — it’s time to reclaim underutilized licenses and re-assign them.

Once you have usage information, it’s easy to reach out to employees who rarely use their licenses for certain apps and ask if your team can reclaim them for future use (some solutions even let you automate this process). From there, you can recycle existing licenses for new employees and even reduce your license count when the opportunity arises.

This active optimization helps clutter from starting in the first place, saving you time and cost now — and lessening the need to spring clean SaaS sprawl in the future.

Turning practice into a process

While cleaning out the clutter in your home may only make sense seasonally, the practice of optimizing your SaaS stack is an ongoing task that grows easier the more consistent your actions become — turning into an almost automated process over time.

Some SaaS Management Platforms make this easy, by providing automated recommendations for opportunities to cut costs through notifying you of underutilized licenses and redundant apps.

Even outside of automation, your team can more easily track spending when you’re gathering real-time information in a centralized location. Having the opportunity to view your total SaaS spend in one easy place, versus collecting that information manually once or twice per year, makes it easy to see when you’re rising above your allotted IT budget. It also makes it way easier to collaborate with Finance, Procurement, and other interested stakeholders on a consistent basis.

After all, the easiest way to clean out clutter and wasted spend is to avoid it building up at all — the same rings true for your SaaS stack.


Uri Haramati is co-founder and CEO of Torii, whose automated SaaS management platform helps modern IT drive businesses forward by making the best use of SaaS. A serial entrepreneur, Uri has founded several successful startups including Life on Air, the parent company behind popular apps such as Meerkat and Houseparty. He also started Skedook, an event discovery app. Uri is passionate about innovating technology that solves complex challenges and creates new opportunities.  

If you enjoyed this article and want to receive more valuable industry content like this, click here to sign up for our digital newsletters!

Tagged With: SaaS, SaaS management, SaaS Spend, SaaS Stack, Shadow IT

Related Content:

  • Cloud, SASE, Aryaka How the Cloud is Redefining Media Production and…
  • Singlewire Software mass notification interview Singlewire Software on Mass Notification Solutions
  • URI catchbox 1 Catchbox Plus: The Mic Solution That Finally Gave…
  • Engaging virtual meeting with diverse participants discussing creative ideas in a bright office space during daylight hours Diversified Survey: Workplace AV Tech is Falling Short,…

Free downloadable guide you may like:

  • Practical Design Guide for Office SpacesPractical Design Guide for Office Spaces

    Recent Gartner research shows that workers prefer to return to the office for in-person meetings for relevant milestones, as well as for face-to-face time with co-workers. When designing the office spaces — and meeting spaces in particular — enabling that connection between co-workers is crucial. But introducing the right collaboration technology in meeting spaces can […]

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Latest Downloads

Practical Design Guide for Office Spaces
Practical Design Guide for Office Spaces

Recent Gartner research shows that workers prefer to return to the office for in-person meetings for relevant milestones, as well as for face-to-fa...

New Camera Can Transform Your Live Production Workflow
New Camera System Can Transform Your Live Production Workflow

Sony's HXC-FZ90 studio camera system combines flexibility and exceptional image quality with entry-level pricing.

Creating Great User Experience and Ultimate Flexibility with Clickshare

Working and collaborating in any office environment today should be meaningful, as workers today go to office for very specific reasons. When desig...

View All Downloads

Would you like your latest project featured on TechDecisions as Project of the Week?

Apply Today!

More from Our Sister Publications

Get the latest news about AV integrators and Security installers from our sister publications:

Commercial IntegratorSecurity Sales

AV-iQ

Footer

TechDecisions

  • Home
  • Welcome to TechDecisions
  • Contact Us
  • Comment Guidelines
  • RSS Feeds
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Linkedin

Free Technology Guides

FREE Downloadable resources from TechDecisions provide timely insight into the issues that IT, A/V, and Security end-users, managers, and decision makers are facing in commercial, corporate, education, institutional, and other vertical markets

View all Guides
TD Project of the Week

Get your latest project featured on TechDecisions Project of the Week. Submit your work once and it will be eligible for all upcoming weeks.

Enter Today!
Emerald Logo
ABOUTCAREERSAUTHORIZED SERVICE PROVIDERSYour Privacy ChoicesTERMS OF USEPRIVACY POLICY

© 2025 Emerald X, LLC. All rights reserved.