Where SAAS waste hides: How to find and fix the spend you can’t see

SaaS waste is spend on subscriptions that are unused, underutilized or duplicated across the organization. It hides in day-to-day behaviors—small purchases, convenient decisions, tools adopted by individuals or departments without IT involvement. The webinar estimates the average enterprise wastes approximately $20 billion a year on SaaS, with roughly a third of per-employee subscription spend going to waste.

No single method covers everything. Browser extensions track usage but not license data. APIs show allocations but not verified usage. CASBs capture traffic but not cost. Financial systems show spend but not who's using the software. The webinar shows how Flexera One SaaS Management combines all six discovery methods into a single platform to eliminate blind spots.

The long tail refers to the large number of low-demand, user-procured SaaS applications that individually seem harmless but collectively represent the largest volume of untracked spend and risk. Universal apps (Salesforce, Microsoft 365) are well-managed, but the long tail—hundreds of apps adopted by individuals—vastly outnumbers them and is where most waste and governance gaps exist.

Shadow AI tools are adopted through browsers and SaaS integrations without IT involvement, and their pricing models—tokens, credits, usage-based—are harder to track than traditional per-seat licenses. The webinar highlights that 30–40% of software spend is now considered shadow IT, with AI accelerating this trend through tools like ChatGPT, Gemini and other GenAI applications.

Flexera One SaaS Management provides the industry's most complete discovery engine—combining browser, agent, API, CASB, SSO and financial discovery—to give organizations full visibility into their SaaS estate. It identifies unused and underutilized licenses, flags overlapping applications for rationalization, provides cost optimization insights and enforces governance policies across sanctioned and unsanctioned apps.

Owen Hughes (00:57 - 01:55)

Hi, everybody. Welcome to our webinar today, which is called where SaaS waste hides.

I'd like to welcome you all. This is my first webinar since joining Flexera a year ago, believe it or not.

So it's it's a big day for me. And this is Alison I'd like you to meet.

Alison is joining the webinar today. This webinar is gonna cover managing your SaaS portfolio using Flexera.

And we are very, very lucky today to have Gary McAllister, our product manager, to give the presentation. He is gonna take questions at the end.

And, you you have questions and you're really, really interested in engaging with us today. We also have Matt Williams on as well who can answer questions, and we're happy to engage with you in the chat while the webinar is going on.

But we are looking forward to hearing what Gary has to say. So, Gary, I will hand over to you.

Gary McAllister (01:55 - 02:05)

Thank you, Alan. Just a bit of housekeeping.

Well, from my side, first off, am I sharing the right screen? Can you see the notes, or can you see the slide?

Owen Hughes (02:05 - 02:09)

We.

the. slide.

We can see the slide.

Gary McAllister (02:09 - 31:02)

Excellent. Cool.

That's a good start. So, yes, thank you all for joining so horrendously early on a Tuesday morning, but I hope everyone's full of caffeine already and and getting getting their day going.

We're gonna keep this fairly light. And as I always said, there's gonna be room for questions at the end.

Or if you wanna ask questions as we're going through, we got some guys in hand who are gonna be answering those for us as well. Now before we get into data and tooling, I just wanna level set what we what we're talking about here.

This session isn't about replacing ITAM or pointing out failures or anything like that. In fact, it's the story today is that ITAM teams are uniquely well positioned to solve a problem that has really grown up around us.

We're gonna be talking about SaaS. Now SaaS waste doesn't sit in obvious places, and this is where it's become a really interesting growing area because SaaS is unlike how we've traditionally managed assets.

It doesn't show up as, you know, a broken server or expired license. It really hides in kind of day to day behaviors, and behaviors are a lot about how SaaS has has grown.

So it's small purchases, convenient decisions, tools that it felt, you know, harmless to to purchase one off at a time. These things grow.

So what I wanna do today is try and make the invisible visible. I do work as a magician part time, so that's not strictly untrue.

So we're gonna look at where, as the title tells us, where SaaS hides, how that spend has crept out of sight, and then we'll talk about why I ITAM teams are actually the best people in the right position to try and bring that back under a bit more control.

So this is less CSI.

It's more kind of archaeology.

It's digging.

It's finding out where these things are.

So technology, as we probably will know, is quickly becoming very close to the top when it comes to spend after people.

This has been growing for years, but technology sat comfortably behind people costs. It was important but predictable, and that's the keyword.

Predictability has changed. Technology is now really competing for that for that budget next to headcount.

So that shift matters because when spend gets big enough, we stop asking, you know, does this work and start asking, is it worth it? Because we see these big spikes in costs. It's a very different conversation.

When those conversations happen, ITEM data suddenly gets pulled into boardrooms, not just audits.

That technology used as a utility in the past, but now it is more of a of a financial thing.

So it is one of the fastest growing categories of spend. We're past the tipping point.

As you can see, these are this is information from from Gartner from from last year. And we can see that there's this huge rise.

It's been carrying on since, really, the pandemic in 2020, and it's only accelerating.

So we've seen an almost fifty percent three year increase in cloud spend, fifty percent three year increase on SaaS spend, and a massive global AI spend, which we will talk about.

You cannot have a webinar without talking about AI, of course. Huge global spend just last year, and, again, that is only only increasing as well.

Most organizations I speak to aren't overspending because they're careless. They're overspending because visibility is still designed to look at how we were two or three years ago and hasn't kept up with this pace of growth that we've seen in these areas.

Owen Hughes (31:02 - 31:10)

I was on mute, which is very, very clever of me. Sorry about that.

Told you it's my first time using this system.

Gary McAllister (31:10 - 31:17)

I was thinking for a moment. Have I just been talking for half an hour, and I've not actually connected?

Owen Hughes (31:17 - 31:27)

We have one question from Ben, which is which financial systems can be connected? Will Ariba be an option in the future?

Gary McAllister (31:27 - 31:48)

At the moment, we have a native connector for Coupa.

We also have the universal connector, which can be configured to most systems.

More financial systems are coming.

Owen Hughes (32:01 - 32:08)

What's the biggest challenge to managing SaaS assets?

Gary McAllister (32:08 - 33:25)

Visibility is the biggest challenge.

You need confidence that you're pulling in all the right information.

Owen Hughes (33:25 - 33:51)

Does Flexera support tracking AI token consumption and usage based metrics?

Gary McAllister (33:51 - 35:06)

That is our number one priority on the SaaS roadmap.

We will have something available very soon.

Owen Hughes (35:06 - 35:18)

Can Flexera discover and manage certificates?

Gary McAllister (35:18 - 35:38)

That's a really good question.

I will need to check and get back on that.

Owen Hughes (36:42 - 38:46)

What are the key KPIs customers care about most?

Gary McAllister (36:42 - 38:15)

Spend is the biggest one.

Seeing wasted dollars focuses attention immediately.

Gary McAllister (38:46 - 40:20)

The biggest worry for executives is the unknown.

Visibility helps people sleep better at night.

Owen Hughes (40:20 - 43:14)

We recently launched the State of the Cloud 2026 report.

Thank you to Gary and everyone who joined today.

Please share feedback and suggestions for future webinars.

Gary McAllister (43:14 - 43:15)

Thank you all.