Half of Software Licenses Goes Unused by Employees, Wasting Businesses Billions
BOSTON / LAUSANNE — February 6, 2023 – Nexthink, the leader in Digital Employee Experience (DEX) management software, has released new findings from its report: Soft-WASTE How Much Does IT Waste on Unused Software Licenses? The report uncovered that half (49.96%) of all software installed went unused by employees. These findings are informed by analyzing more than 6 million customer environments across 8 industries and 12 regions, looking at historical data of the first few months of Nexthink implementation to set the best standard of what an average business is dealing with when it comes to a lack of visibility around software licenses.
“These new findings highlight the pervasive problem facing businesses in 2023: the need to achieve sustainable efficiency,” said Yassine Zaied, Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer at Nexthink. “Shutting down licenses in a random or uninformed manner 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 used, what is still performing and what needs to be repaired or replaced, can it see and take advantage of greater efficiencies in a sustainable and recurring manner.”
Looking at more than 30 popular software tools, the report used an averaging licensing fee per user per month (ranging from $8 per user to $83) and calculated that based on the unused software licenses we found in our 6 million data set. It was discovered that it was costing those businesses about $45M per month, or roughly half a billion per year. That’s not the only cost saving opportunity for businesses, the report discovered that many knowledge workers are using multiple applications for the same purpose. For example, roughly 37% of employees use 3 browser applications to access their SaaS tools and the internet, and 31% use 2 collaboration tools.
The report findings also uncovered trends in application utilization. Which applications were the most actively utilized? (+50%)
- Slack
- Teams
- Zoom
- Webex host
- Asana
And which were not actively utilized? (<15%)
- Tableau
- Trello
- Notion App
- Spotfire
- BlueJeans
This report comes on the heels of the Nexthink Infinity launch, including Collaboration Experience, which brings “See, Diagnose & Fix” capabilities, advanced telemetry and insights to top collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams and Zoom. Collaboration Experience is helping customers to maintain seamless experience and connectivity across more than 1.7 million calls a day. For more information on how customers are gleaning powerful insights from Collaboration Experience, check out: Insights and Tips from over 100 million Teams and Zoom Calls.
For more information and to read the full report, check out: https://nexthink.com/resource/unused-software-licenses
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