Nexthink, the leading provider of digital employee experience (DEX) management software, has released new insights from its report: Soft-WASTE How Much Does IT Waste on Unused Software Licenses? The report revealed that half (49.96%) of all software installed was left unused by employees. These results are based on the analysis of more than 6 million customer environments across 8 industries and 12 regions, looking at historical data from the first few months of Nexthink implementation to set the best standard for how the average organization manages with a lack of transparency all around software licenses.
“These new insights underscore the pervasive problem facing businesses in 2023: the need to achieve sustainable efficiencies,” said Yassine Zaied, chief strategy, and marketing officer at Nexthink. “An arbitrary or uninformed deactivation of licenses can lead to higher costs in the medium term. Only when IT has access to all the information about who is using what, what is not being used, what is still working, and what needs to be fixed or replaced can IT identify and leverage sustained and recurring efficiencies.”
The report looks at more than 30 popular software tools and takes an average license fee per user per month (ranging from $8 per user to $83) and calculates that based on the unused software licenses we found in our 6 million datasets. Turns out it was costing those companies about $45 million a month, or about half a billion a year. It’s not the only cost-saving opportunity for companies, the report found that many knowledge workers use multiple applications for the same purpose. For example, approximately 37% of employees use 3 browser applications to access their SaaS tools and the web, and 31% use 2 collaboration tools.
The report’s findings also uncovered trends in application usage. Which applications were used most actively? (+50%)
Relaxed
teams
zoom
Webex host
asana
And which ones were not actively used? (<15%)
panel
Trello
term app
Spotfire
Blue jeans
This report follows the launch of Nexthink Infinity, including Collaboration Experience, which brings See, Diagnose & Fix capabilities, advanced telemetry, and insights into top collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams and Zoom. Collaboration Experience helps customers maintain a seamless experience and connectivity with more than 1.7 million calls per day. For more information on how customers are deriving meaningful insights from collaboration experience, see Insights and tips from over 100 million teams and Zoom calls.
