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Enterprise SaaS costs keep climbing, and organizations are feeling the impact. The average organization now spends $49M a year on SaaS, and companies with more than 10,000 employees spend upwards of $284M. Gartner expects this number to reach $299B by the end of 2025, showing just how quickly software spend continues to grow.
For IT leaders, CIOs, and FinOps teams, the challenge goes beyond growth in tools. Visibility erodes as software becomes harder to track. This expanding complexity is due to:
These forces make it harder to see what you’re actually paying for, which is why most enterprises underestimate their real SaaS spend by more than 300%. As spend disappears into expense reports, you lose your ability to control renewals, eliminate redundant apps, or rightsize licenses.
Because renewal is a critical moment to truly reduce software costs, scattered processes leave you reacting instead of managing. That’s where accurate spend visibility and consistent SaaS renewal management become essential. With the right foundation, you can uncover hidden spend, bring renewals into focus, and build a repeatable process for SaaS savings year after year.
Today, the following challenges define enterprise-scale SaaS environments and shape why these organizations require purpose-built governance tools.
Enterprises operate in software environments where decisions happen across regions, business units, and teams simultaneously. As portfolios grow more distributed, visibility breaks down and IT, Finance, Procurement, and Security no longer share a consistent view of what the organization owns, uses, or risks.
Decentralized purchasing gets amplified in large enterprises due to regions and departments acquiring SaaS independently—not just individuals. As a result, it leads to duplicate tools, inconsistent data, and a lack of unified visibility. Without a single source of truth, leaders struggle to answer foundational questions about usage, ownership, and upcoming renewals.
When enterprises grow through acquisition, they inherit entire SaaS stacks—multiple HR tools, project trackers, security platforms, and redundant licenses. Zylo’s 2025 SaaS Management Index shows that the portfolios for companies with more than 10,000 employees grow by an average of 22% annually. M&A activity significantly accelerates that sprawl. Newly combined organizations frequently discover conflicting contracts, unknown tools, and unvetted applications brought in by acquired teams.
Enterprises must comply with overlapping international and regional laws, including GDPR, HIPAA, and CCPA. Different jurisdictions impose unique data residency rules, breach notification timelines, and audit requirements. Validating that every application meets all relevant compliance standards across every location is a level of governance that smaller organizations simply do not face.
Enterprise procurement is lengthy and highly regulated. Multi-step risk reviews, security assessments, legal evaluations, and stakeholder approvals further slow the process. To keep work moving, employees often bypass formal procurement, which increases shadow IT and reduces compliance control.
A 10,000-employee enterprise uses an average of 660 SaaS applications—more than triple the number used by smaller organizations. In addition, IT manages only around 27% of software spend. Meanwhile, business units and individuals are responsible for the remaining 73%. With departments managing their own tools and budgets, visibility erodes quickly, creating redundant apps, inconsistent renewals, and gaps in governance.
Enterprise teams often manage hundreds of SaaS vendors and contracts at once, each with unique renewal dates, pricing models, compliance risks, and terms. Overlapping contracts for the same software across regions are common. Missed auto-renewals, inconsistent contract clauses, and region-specific obligations introduce unnecessary spend and operational risk.
Because enterprise environments are fragmented across regions, systems, and purchasing channels, traditional discovery methods are unreliable. Instead, starting with financial data becomes the most dependable discovery approach.
Many tools begin with app-level detection, which often misses:
By surfacing spend first, you can see the full SaaS footprint. This positions you to rightsize licenses, prepare for renewals, and build a repeatable SaaS cost optimization motion grounded in accurate data.
Cost savings depend on understanding where spend is happening, so clear visibility into SaaS purchases becomes the natural starting point. In most large organizations, SaaS spend is scattered across:
When these data sources are centralized in a SaaS Management Platform like Zylo, you gain a clear view of:
This clarity gives you the foundation you need to prepare for renewals, negotiate effectively, and uncover meaningful savings opportunities.
Zylo’s discovery model uses financial data—instead of relying solely on app detection or authentication logs—because it is the most reliable source of truth for identifying SaaS. First, it determines which purchases are SaaS, based on Zylo’s analysis of $2T in cloud and SaaS spend. Then, it identifies the application by matching it against Zylo’s vast application catalog and learned models.
The discovery engine uses:
This approach captures spend across:
You gain a complete, accurate inventory of every subscription tied to real dollars.
Long-term SaaS savings don’t come from one-time cleanup efforts. They come from operational consistency. SaaS Operations gives you the structure, visibility, and governance needed to manage hundreds of applications, dozens of stakeholders, and a nonstop stream of renewals. When you establish this foundation, you shift from reacting to surprises to running a predictable savings engine.
SaaS Operations (SaaS Ops) is the practice of running software management as a structured, repeatable function rather than an ad hoc set of tasks. For IT, CIOs, and FinOps leaders, it becomes the connective tissue that aligns usage data, contracts, ownership, and renewal workflows.
In large organizations, this work includes:
With SaaS Ops, your data stays accurate, your owners accountable, and your renewal process predictable—even as new tools, pricing models, and AI features enter the environment.
“There is a need for a controlling and governing body to run all processes as smoothly as possible. Not having an ops team for SaaS makes it more complicated for the business to grow and introduces the risk of shadow IT.”
— Vlad Tsapko, AVP, Business Operations at Insurity
Savings come from repeatable behaviors, not isolated actions. SaaS Operations establishes the discipline you need to realize savings at scale by organizing every renewal around a single set of data and decisions.
With the right SaaS Ops motion in place, you can:
Operational rigor turns renewals into opportunities for savings rather than risks of overspend. It ensures that every contract goes through the same checkpoints:
When SaaS Operations becomes part of your day-to-day operations, you create a sustainable path to ongoing SaaS cost optimization. It sets the stage for building a full savings pipeline, where every renewal becomes predictable, actionable, and measurable.
In 2025, Zylo data shows that large enterprises (10k+ employees) average 476 renewals and $284M in spend annually. Assuming 50% of annual SaaS spend is up for renewal each year, that’s a savings opportunity pipeline of $142M. Each renewal becomes a discrete opportunity to eliminate waste, rightsize licenses, and consolidate applications.
You can move these opportunities forward the same way you guide deals through a high-value pipeline:
With hundreds of applications feeding into this flow, structuring renewals like a pipeline helps you manage them predictably, stage by stage, with a process designed to consistently drive savings:
DP Poole, COO at Zylo, and Delainey Trost, Manager of Services at Zylo walk through how to build a savings pipeline at a recent webinar.
A savings pipeline starts with an accurate system of record. Establish this by unifying spend, contracts, and ownership in one place.
Outcome: An up-to-date inventory of applications, owners, and contract details that becomes the foundation for renewal planning.
Not every app demands the same level of attention. Prioritize your applications by the greatest spend, renewal urgency, or savings potential.
Outcome: A defined list of high-impact applications to run through a prescriptive renewal process, whether that’s 20 apps, 50 apps, or more.
SaaS savings depend on repeatability. Design a consistent renewal process and ensure the organization understands how it works.
Outcome: Clear documentation and cross-functional alignment on the processes needed to operate the savings pipeline.
This is where savings are realized. A structured cadence ensures every renewal moves through the same sequence of checkpoints.
Ask yourself these three questions at every renewal:
Outcome: Hard cost savings and avoided spend achieved through consistent, data-driven renewal decisions.
A savings pipeline isn’t complete without visibility into outcomes. Show stakeholders where savings were created and how the program is performing through regular reporting.
Outcome: Clear, shared visibility into the financial impact of your SaaS Management program across all stakeholders.
Enterprise teams like yours are already using Zylo to turn complex SaaS environments into measurable savings. Their results show what becomes possible when you pair accurate discovery with a structured savings pipeline.
Adobe needed to control a fast-growing SaaS portfolio spread across multiple systems and business units. By using Zylo to centralize spend, usage, and contract data, the team uncovered far more titles than expected and went on to realize more than $60 million in cost savings and avoidance, along with thousands of hours in time savings.
Adobe Drives Innovation and Massive Savings with Zylo
In the past 4 years, Adobe has rapidly scaled from $9B to $18B. This growth has made an already complex environment even more complex. Learn how they leveraged Zylo to get complete visibility into their SaaS portfolio, unlock millions in cost savings and avoidance and improve the employee experience.
AbbVie manages one of the largest software portfolios in pharma, with a SaaS portfolio of 1,500+ apps and ~US $200 million in SaaS spend. Partnering with Zylo, they focused on shadow IT, rationalization, and license optimization, canceling more than 60 unauthorized subscriptions, reducing expensed software spend by 47%, and achieving $2.2 million in Salesforce cost avoidance.
Netflix needed better alignment between license counts, usage, and contracts across its SaaS estate. Using Zylo to rightsize licenses and match entitlements to actual demand, its ITAM leader reports saving over seven figures while improving how the organization evaluates and manages SaaS tools over time.
The Home Depot initially assumed SaaS spend was under control until Zylo’s discovery revealed unknown tools, owners, and contracts. By bringing FinOps discipline to SaaS with Zylo, they gained centralized data, clearer ownership, and a structured renewal cadence of 120, 90, 60, and 30 days. The team moved from reactive renewals to a governed, repeatable savings motion that continues to surface new optimization opportunities each cycle.
Large enterprises need a SaaS Management solution that supports the scale and complexity of their business operations. Enter Zylo.
Zylo is designed to reflect the organizational realities of enterprises, including:
Zylo’s enterprise capabilities make it easier to manage software amidst these challenges. Capabilities include:
With these capabilities, global organizations finally gain a shared system of record for SaaS while preserving the autonomy required across regions and teams. This unified foundation strengthens governance, accelerates savings, and supports a shift from tactical cost-cutting to strategic SaaS Management aligned with how modern enterprises operate.
SaaS operates across every corner of your business, and your renewals do the same. Each renewal creates a moment where you can reduce software spend. When you treat those moments as a structured savings pipeline, you can capture meaningful value year after year. That level of control requires clear visibility, defined ownership, and a consistent renewal motion.
Zylo has spent nearly a decade helping enterprise teams build these systems, turning distributed SaaS portfolios into predictable savings and long-term governance. Ready to bring this structure to your environment?
You reduce software costs by acting early in the renewal cycle and using accurate data to guide decisions. The most effective levers include:
A consistent renewal process ensures these steps happen every time—not only when someone flags an issue.
Zylo helps organizations save money at scale. Combining its enterprise-ready platform and industry expertise, Zylo ensures you:
IT cost optimization aligns spend with real usage and business value. For SaaS, this usually involves:
This approach helps you keep the tools your teams rely on while eliminating unnecessary cost.
A renewal is your chance to evaluate whether a tool still meets business needs. It’s also when you determine:
It is the most opportune moment for spend to formally go down.
Many enterprises underestimate their SaaS spend by 300%. Hidden waste usually comes from:
Accurate discovery and a structured renewal pipeline surface this waste and turn it into measurable savings.
A renewal calendar consolidates everything you need to plan ahead, including:
Most enterprise teams rely on a SaaS Management Platform like Zylo to keep this calendar accurate as contracts and ownership change.
The most important data inputs for contract optimization include:
With these details aligned, you can rightsize licenses and negotiate from a stronger position.
Teams should begin a renewal review 90–120 days in advance from the contract end date. This window allows time to:
Starting early increases leverage and helps avoid last-minute renewals that lock in unnecessary cost.
Table of Contents Toggle6 Common SaaS Challenges for EnterprisesSiloed Portfolios and...
Table of Contents Toggle6 Common SaaS Challenges for EnterprisesSiloed Portfolios and...
Table of Contents Toggle6 Common SaaS Challenges for EnterprisesSiloed Portfolios and...
Table of Contents Toggle6 Common SaaS Challenges for EnterprisesSiloed Portfolios and...
