Flexera’s 2023 State of ITAM Report highlights the latest trends and statistics surrounding ITAM and SAM teams across the globe, including challenges, initiatives and return on investment (ROI) of programs. The report captures the responses from 500 technical professionals and executives from a survey conducted in March of 2023. The respondents—global ITAM decision makers and users—revealed the challenges they face, their current and future initiatives, experience with audits and the ROI they’re realizing for their organizations.
Select highlights of the report are included below.
Wasted IT spending remains a challenge
This year’s report reaffirmed that wasted spend across desktop, data center, SaaS and IaaS/PaaS remains high. While organizations are increasing the maturity of their ITAM programs and identifying savings, there are still a lot of opportunities to decrease wasted spend.
SAM programs have a proven ROI
Organizations are finding immense value from their SAM programs and were asked to estimate the combined savings and cost avoidance they’ve realized over the past year. Eleven percent realized more than $25 million and 39 percent realized between $1 million and $10 million in savings and cost avoidance.
SAM and FinOps work hand in hand
SAM teams are crucial and interact with numerous parts of the organization. Sixty-eight percent interact with the IT service management (ITSM) team and 64 percent interact with infrastructure and operations (I&O). This year’s report is the first time we captured SAM teams’ interaction with FinOps teams, and we already see a sizable portion (25 percent) of organizations where their SAM and FinOps teams are in alignment.
ITAM responsibilities are in flux
The world of ITAM is constantly changing as evidenced by the SAM-focused responsibilities identified in the report. Currently, ITAM teams are most focused on tracking use of software licenses on-premises, responding to audits and providing data/analysis to support security. However, teams are planning to shift focus towards optimization based on use rights, software reclamation and tracking and optimizing IaaS/PaaS spend and usage in the near future.
Audits continue to cost organizations millions
Software vendors continue to audit their customers regularly. Microsoft leads the pack as the top auditor. Fifty-three percent of respondents reported they were audited by Microsoft in the past three years compared to 46 percent last year.
These audits can prove to be extremely costly as evidenced by the three percent of organizations who report paying $25 million or more in software audits over the past three years and 12 percent who report paying $5 million or more.
IT Asset Management
It all starts with knowing what’s in your IT ecosystem. Flexera One discovers even the most elusive assets whether on-prem, SaaS, cloud, containers and more.
The ITAM role is constantly changing, and professionals are at the nexus of several key enterprise initiatives, including cost savings, FinOps, security and even ESG programs tracking carbon emissions. As organizations are dealing with the extraordinary disruption of the past few years, ITAM teams must stay nimble and flexible, and manage a single source of truth for IT data and insights.
Get the latest insights into ITAM. View the full report for the complete survey results.
