Discover how 500 global IT professionals leverage ITAM and SAM to minimize wasted spend and achieve significant savings.
Flexera released its 2023 State of ITAM report. The report explores how the maturity of IT asset management (ITAM) teams impacts organizations. This year’s report focuses on how collaboration between stakeholders and robust SAM programs saves companies millions.
About 500 technical professionals and executive leaders participated in the 2023 survey—sharing how ITAM improves their audit response, vendor management, and cost savings.
SoftwareOne recently partnered with Flexera to discuss the report’s findings in an informative webinar. But don’t worry if you couldn’t attend the live event. We’ve put together this recap with five key insights from the report.
It’s challenging to optimize your cloud usage and spend when teams operate in silos. A successful ITAM practice requires groups such as SAM, FinOps, Procurement, and Security to work together. Collaborating helps you leverage economies of scale and optimize licenses. You may also learn strategies from other teams that can help you drive more value in the cloud.
Since collaboration is critical, it’s unsurprising that more SAM professionals interact with other enterprise teams—from IT Service Management to Procurement. And, for the first time, FinOps appears on the list of teams that SAM groups interact with heavily. A quarter of SAM professionals have built strong relationships with FinOps teams this past year.
In the future, the lines between SAM and FinOps will blur further. This is an exciting area to keep an eye on.
Moving from on-premises to cloud environments hasn’t minimized vendor audits. Respondents have reported more audits than ever.
Microsoft takes the lead when it comes to auditing its customers. About 53% of respondents stated that Microsoft audited them this year, up from 46% last year. This dramatic increase suggests that Microsoft’s audit efforts are successful, and the company may continue on this path.
The increase in audits also shows that SAM is still important after you migrate to the cloud. Tracking your software assets can help you avoid over-licensing, eliminate waste, and identify unauthorized software.
On a positive note, the time organizations spend responding to publisher audits dropped to 18%—compared to 24% in 2022 and 27% in 2021. The time spent supporting audits will likely continue to decrease as ITAM tools improve in usability and provide deeper insights into hybrid IT estates.
Organizations are expanding their ITAM programs to cover a wider variety of assets. This year, 47% of respondents said they track their software usage in containers. Meanwhile, 55% track their software licenses in the public cloud.
The more advanced an organization’s ITAM program, the more cloud assets they monitor. Over half of the advanced users track their use of licenses in SaaS (65%), public cloud (64%), and containers (56%). And 68% of advanced organizations provide data and analysis to support security.
These stats show how the public cloud is now crucial to ITAM programs. ITAM and SAM professionals who develop their cloud expertise can gain deeper insights into their organization’s costs. They can also advance in their careers as cloud cost management or FinOps becomes increasingly essential.
According to a recent SoftwareOne report, 50% of businesses said that gaining visibility into their cloud costs is a top challenge.
Despite efforts to move to the cloud and become more efficient, Flexera’s respondents still waste a significant portion of their IT budgets. They currently underutilize or waste 36% of their desktop software spend, 33% of their data center software spend, 32% of their SaaS spend, and 32% of their IaaS/PaaS spend.
These large numbers show that wasted spend is a moving target across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments. Optimizing costs requires ITAM professionals to increase their cloud expertise and involvement. Gaining a clear, comprehensive view of your cloud environment can help you identify savings opportunities.
The Flexera survey also found that 68% of advanced organizations have SAM and Procurement teams that work together to prepare for vendor contract renewals. Collaborating in this area can help organizations get better terms and rates on software purchases.
SAM programs aren’t just good for minimizing the time and hassle of vendor audits—they can also save you millions of dollars. Over half (55%) of respondents said their SAM program saved them more than $1 million in the past year, while 16% claimed they saved more than $10 million.
The Flexera 2023 State of ITAM report highlights the importance of collaboration between ITAM, SAM, FinOps, and other relevant teams. When groups align around a shared ITAM strategy, you can complete vendor audits faster, optimize cloud spend, minimize waste, and achieve significant savings.
Get your SoftwareOne ITAM Assessment to gain real-time visibility into your software licenses and cloud spending.
Get your SoftwareOne ITAM Assessment to gain real-time visibility into your software licenses and cloud spending.
