Employees use only half of the software licenses provided

Study shows possible savings strategies for companies

With the report "Soft-Waste: How much waste is caused by unused software licenses?", Nexthink, a digital employee experience (DEX) management software company, reveals that half (49.96 percent) of all installed software in companies is not used by employees, shedding light on the huge cost implications of unnecessary software licenses. The findings are based on analysis of more than six million endpoints from Nexthink customers across eight industries and twelve regions. Historical data from the first few months of a Nexthink implementation was used as a baseline for understanding the unnecessary costs that the average organization faces due to lack of visibility into software licensing.

The report examined more than 30 common software tools. An average license fee per user per month (between $8 and $83) was used to calculate the cost of the unused software licenses that Nexthink was able to identify in the six-million data set. The result: the unused software licenses cost the companies studied around $45 million per month, or around half a billion per year. 

But that's not the only cost-saving potential for companies.The Nexthink analysis also found that many knowledge workers use multiple applications for the same purpose. For example, 37 percent of employees use three browser applications to access their SaaS tools and the web, while 31 percent use two tools for collaboration. The report's findings also show trends in application usage. The applications that are most actively used (+50 percent) are Slack, Teams, Zoom, Webex Host and Asana. The applications that are not actively used (<15 percent) are Tableau, Trello, Notion App, Spotfire and BlueJeans.