How To Rightsize Your SaaS Portfolio

4 steps to reduce SaaS OpEx and still optimize for remote work

Today, IT and Finance teams are simultaneously being asked to both reduce costs and manage a dramatic surge in remote work.

The largest IT cost at many companies is the sprawl of hundreds of SaaS applications that drive significant ongoing operational expense, often referred to as SaaS OpEx.

How can IT teams reduce SaaS OpEx? Which applications are being used and which aren’t? 

Definition: SaaS Rightsizing

SaaS Rightsizing is a balanced approach of reducing application spend while increasing business value from those applications. Rightsizing extends beyond tracking software licenses and logins to consider employee engagement and usage. To properly rightsize applications, IT and Finance teams need several layers of information:

• • Application contracts, costs, and renewal timing
  • Provisioned and active application licenses by license tier
  • Employee engagement data by feature, team, location, and other factors

How to Rightsize

1. Throw away SaaS tracking spreadsheets

Most companies rely on manually updated out-of-date spreadsheets and employee surveys to understand which employees are using which systems. That process just doesn’t work for hundreds of SaaS applications.

Data on employees, licenses, and application usage is constantly changing. To make accurate decisions about the need to decrease or increase application licenses, you must also understand how employees actually use applications, right down to the feature level. License and login activity is not enough. 

Example: The CIO at Apttus recently implemented Productiv and shared that “By putting all of our apps into Productiv, 100% of our landscape is now manageable out of the box. We’re no longer spending time doing data entry. We’re really looking at data analysis and doing higher quality work. I mean to the point where we’ve saved at least 10+ hours a week of my team’s time and more in the business teams as well.”

2. Reclaim existing SaaS licenses

For many SaaS applications, you don’t have to wait until the next renewal cycle to optimize spend; there are immediate opportunities to reclaim or reprovision licenses.

Configure custom rules to enable automatic reclaim and reprovisioning of your existing licenses. This allows you to easily and automatically adjust license tiers for specific users, teams, or based on other factors, so that every employee has exactly what they need to get their job done.

Example: One Productiv customer achieved almost $150K in immediate value using automatic reclaim and license tier downgrading. This customer was planning to purchase additional ServiceNow licenses to support users in a new region. Using the rightsizing recommendations, Productiv data showed that while the customer had many users provisioned with expensive Fulfiller licenses, many of the users were only using features of the basic Requester license. The customer was able to use Productiv to automatically downgrade those users, obviating the need to buy additional licenses to support the new region.