Is your business wasting the software budget?

No matter how much money your company spends on software, it’s likely to spend less if your boss reads this article.

A new survey by American software company Flexera Software suggests that most companies are wasting their software budget, and the software they buy is often either underused or overused.

According to the report entitled The State of the (Software) Estate: Waste Is Running Rampant in Enterprises, most companies are wasting money on something called shelfware, which is unused or underused software, and are simultaneously out of compliance with their software contracts.

That leads to many companies being audited by software vendors, some even multiple times a year.

The report says 75 percent of businesses claim at least some of their software is overused, while 65 percent of them were audited by software vendors (23 percent three times, or even more).

It also says that basically all key players in the software industry, including Microsoft, Oracle, Adobe, to name a few, are reviewing license keys for a number of businesses, while 44 percent of enterprises paid $100,000 (£70,000) or more in true-up costs to their software vendors as a result of noncompliant software use.

The software license landscape is complex due to the sheer number of contracts to manage, the different types of licenses that must be administered, the different rules adopted by different vendors, and the fact that many organizations track their licensing information manually.

"We believe that as much as 33 percent of the software budget is being wasted due to insufficient software license management", said R “Ray” Wang, principal analyst and founder at Constellation Research. "Organizations should focus on continual software license compliance to reduce software audit risk, and on fully utilizing the product use rights they’ve negotiated in their contracts to reduce shelfware".

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