Report: Companies are wasting 1/3 or more of their IT budgets

C-level executives are actively looking for new ways to save money ahead of 2023. They are increasingly turning to IT asset managers to find savings.

Cutting unnecessary IT spending is critical.One Flessella On average, IT asset managers estimate that a third or more of their current IT budget is wasted, the report found. This includes desktop software (38% of spend wasted), data center software (34%), software as a service (33%) and IaaS/PaaS (33%).

With the global economy teetering on the brink of recession, ITAM teams are growing in importance and influence. This year, the Flexera State of ITAM report found that 43 percent of IT asset manager (ITAM) teams report directly to the CIO/CTO, nearly double last year’s figure of 22 percent.

ITAM, SAM Savings Impact IT Budgets

High-performance ITAM teams continue to focus on cost savings and modernization. A top-notch ITAM manager knows how to save money. Software asset management (SAM) programs most successfully achieve savings by reusing (non-cloud) licenses to avoid purchasing new licenses (83%); better negotiating vendor contracts (83%); reducing maintenance on unused software Spending (81%). The survey also found that savings from SAM projects increase as the project matures.

ITAM managers know how to avoid audits. This is still an important skill. Fifty-two percent of respondents said they had been audited by Microsoft in the past three years, followed by IBM (34%) and Oracle (31%).Unfortunately, 14% of companies say they pay software vendors more than $5 million Audit fees Over the past three years – up from 9% the previous year.

Emphasizing the importance of software asset management, more than half of SAM respondents (53%) reported having implemented “advanced” SAM practices, which the report defines as going beyond responsive auditing and tracking of SaaS and cloud usage, including continuous tracking and Optimized software licenses.Fewer organizations have gone this far with hardware asset management (HAM), with only 36% reporting implementing “advanced” HAM, defined in the report as including tracking end-of-life/end-of-service as well as inventory, deployment and firmware.

investigation method

The Flexera State of ITAM report explores the thinking of 500 global professionals who manage and participate in ITAM, SAM and HAM processes in medium and large organizations with at least 1,000 employees. The survey will be conducted in summer 2022.

read full report From Flexera.