Optimizing SaaS Spend

Complete visibility, centralized SaaS app cost analysis, and renewal and licensing management are essential to reign in SaaS spend.

Existing Challenge

As more workforces shift to remote and hybrid models, spend on SaaS apps has skyrocketed, driving the need to control licensing management and gain better visibility into spend.
Areas driving SaaS spending issues include:

• Shadow SaaS: When employees procure SaaS applications without IT’s knowledge, the number of SaaS applications in the organization increases. This adds to the SaaS spend.
• Redundant apps: Procuring SaaS applications without checking the existing SaaS stack also increases the overall SaaS spend. With scores of SaaS applications in use, it’s common for companies to have multiple SaaS applications delivering the same functionality.
• Extraneous user licenses: Organizations risk unnecessary spending if they’re not properly monitoring their SaaS user licenses. Underused or duplicate SaaS licenses can result in extraneous costs.

How Axonius Solves SaaS Licensing and Spend

Axonius SaaS Management provides centralized SaaS apps cost analysis and licensing management, in order to help reduce costs by rightsizing SaaS licenses and redundant applications. Additionally, with its detailed renewal calendar, Axonius SaaS Management helps inform and manage SaaS renewals with alerts and license utilization insights.

To achieve that, Axonius aggregates, correlates, and categorizes costs and licensing information from both financial data sources - licensing or expense repositories, and individual SaaS applications.
With its comprehensive discovery capabilities, Axonius ensures SaaS licensing and spend optimization across the organization’s entire app stack, including shadow SaaS applications.

Discovering Redundant Applications

The product discovers and segments all SaaS applications across the organization’s app stack to help identify redundant apps.
First, using the Spending module, we filter the applications per one or multiple categories of interest. In this case, we use the category filter and select the Project Management category.

Within the fully customizable and, in this case, 12 months timeframe, we see multiple applications with potentially duplicative functionalities being in use worth review - Monday, Trello, and Asana.

Using this logic, the product makes it easy not only to find SaaS apps that may be redundant, but also to identify spikes in spending for specific SaaS providers, and track spend across the entire company.

Identifying Excessive Users and Licenses

By providing an extensive view into inactive user count per application (E.g., users not being active for the last 90 days), Axonius provides insight into extraneous spending on existing SaaS licenses.
To understand the inactive user breakdown per application, you can use the widget of the solution’s Users module. It continuously tracks the exact count of active/inactive users per application.