Enterprise Software Savings Estimator

• CFOs, finance business partners, and procurement leaders setting software cost-reduction targets
• IT leaders building a business case for licence optimization work
• Organizations with a renewal or true-up approaching in the next 12 months
• Teams that suspect shelfware but have never quantified it

• Annual software spend across licences and support
• Vendor mix — which publishers make up that spend
• Estimated share of unused or under-used licences
• Number of renewals in the next 12 months
• Organization size
• Existing SAM resources

1. 1Your spend is split across the publishers you select and a typical optimization range is applied per publisher — Oracle and IBM carry wider ranges than Adobe because their metrics allow more re-architecture.
2. 2Unused licences are added as a separate recovery, discounted to 35–70% because shelfware rarely sheds fully mid-term.
3. 3Multipliers adjust for renewal count, organization size, and SAM maturity: more renewals raise the near-term opportunity, a mature SAM team lowers it because much of the value is already captured.
4. 4The total is capped at a defensible share of annual spend and shown as a range, never a single number.

A 7,000-employee organization spends $5M a year across Oracle and Microsoft, estimates 15% shelfware, has one major renewal ahead, and tracks licences in spreadsheets.

Estimated annual savings

$0.9M – $2.0M

As a share of annual spend

18% – 40%

Shelfware identified

$750K

Indicative 3-year value

$4.4M

The range is the size of the prize, not a guaranteed outcome. The low end is generally reachable through entitlement clean-up and shelfware retirement alone. Reaching the high end usually requires re-metering, architecture change, or a renegotiated renewal — work that has to start months before the contract date.