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Think about the last time you cleaned out your closet. For the most part, the goal involves taking inventory of your wardrobe and making the executive decision to keep, condense, or remove each and every item.
Now, imagine if you lived with hundreds of roommates — all sharing the same closet. It would quickly become unruly, to say the least. You’d find multiple pairs of the same item, as well as expensive garments that never saw the light of day.
Organizations face a similar scenario when keeping tabs on their ever-growing inventory of software applications, thanks to the explosion of employee-led purchasing of software-as-a-service (SaaS), such as file sharing and video conferencing tools.
Because SaaS is so easy to acquire with only a credit card and email address, employees bypass IT and go straight to the source. Often, organizations end up with multiple applications that provide the same capability, and sometimes they even discover multiple instances of the same application. It leads to a bunch of headaches like wasted spend, security risks, redundant applications, and missed renewals.
To take control of SaaS governance, many organizations use license management software to streamline SaaS application rationalization.
What is Software Application Rationalization?
Software application rationalization involves figuring out which of your tools and application licenses should remain in active use, and which need to be replaced, retired, or consolidated. License management software, such as Zylo, analyzes your complete SaaS portfolio — including utilization data for each license — to unlock powerful SaaS rationalization insights.
Consider these tips from Zylo’s playbook for SaaS rationalization:
- Determine your baseline inventory. Discover all of the applications you currently have in place, regardless if they’re known to IT or not. Then, make sure to categorize each application by function, and set up automatic tracking to avoid unintended auto-renewals.
- Choose your go-to tools. Full discovery will likely uncover a wealth of surprises, such as redundant SaaS applications. But don’t leave these costly applications in place — determine the right tools to use across the organization, communicate the change, and mandate company-wide adoption. With a SaaS Management tool like Zylo, you can whitelist these applications to ensure compliance and maintain security protocols.
- Remove non business-critical applications. If you can’t justify a SaaS application, especially for how it ties to financial outcomes, process improvements, or business goals, then think about retiring it.
- Eliminate subscriptions tied to employee headcount. Shadow IT quickly gets in the way of effective SaaS governance. Stop it in its tracks by reducing the number of apps not directly controlled by IT.
A SaaS rationalization audit ultimately gives you clear intel into your IT stack and SaaS spend to move forward with efficient SaaS Management. Just note that a key component of application rationalization involves taking precise, data-driven action. To do that seamlessly, you need license management software, such as the newly released Zylo Insights.
Zylo Insights Uncovers Key Portfolio and Usage Data
In a single dashboard, Zylo Insights reveals personalized, prioritized, and actionable recommendations to inform rightsizing and cost savings initiatives. It lists recommendations by largest impact, so you can immediately take action from the Insights dashboard.
With Zylo Insights, you can:
- Quickly view your complete tech stack, including newly discovered licenses, duplicate subscriptions, and expired contracts — all from an accurate system of record.
- Determine wasteful payment issues by uncovering apps that were expensed by individual employees or teams, multiple users expensing duplicate applications, and even SaaS that covers multiple cost centers.
- Maximize ROI by prioritizing opportunities by greatest impact.
Software Rationalization: From Insights to Action in an Instant
Effective application rationalization all comes down to insights, and you need to easily identify the most impactful opportunities and spring into action to optimize your SaaS portfolio. Zylo Insights becomes your secret weapon.
And you’ll never need to wade through piles of data, as Zylo’s license management software presents the most important insights, always ranked by order of importance. Only Zylo breaks it down by license level, giving you a real-time snapshot of your SaaS portfolio and license utilization.
Pranab Sinha, Chief Information Officer at Genesys, a leading cloud customer experience and contact center solution, partnered with Zylo to reduce costs and identify consolidation opportunities, as well as unused or underutilized SaaS. It’s a move he says paid off in many ways for the company.
“These are hidden problems that every company has,” Sinha says. “Zylo is exposing the things that people need to know about. As a result of our consolidation, we’ve seen substantial savings.”
Ready to dive deeper with Zylo Insights? Reach out today to schedule a personalized demo.