Eliminate SaaS Sprawl and Recover the Budget Buried in Unused Subscriptions
Enterprise SaaS portfolios accumulate subscriptions faster than they're rationalized — resulting in redundant tools, unused licenses, and significant spend on applications that employees have long since stopped using. RLM's SaaS portfolio review typically identifies 20-35% of SaaS spend as recoverable.
What RLM Delivers on SaaS Portfolio Review
SaaS sprawl is the single largest source of recoverable IT spend in most enterprises. Shadow IT purchases, departmental subscriptions, and renewal auto-renewals create a portfolio that no one has visibility into — until someone looks.
How We Approach SaaS Portfolio Review
A structured path through the SaaS Portfolio Review decision — current-state discovery, shortlist and benchmark, commercial negotiation, then support until it is actually working.
SaaS Discovery & Inventory
We use a combination of financial data analysis (expense reports, AP records, credit card transactions) and SSO/network traffic analysis to build a comprehensive inventory of SaaS applications in use — including shadow IT subscriptions.
Usage & Value Assessment
For each application, we assess actual utilization — active users vs. licensed users, feature usage breadth, and whether the application's capabilities are duplicated by other tools in the portfolio.
Rationalization Recommendations
We develop specific recommendations for each application: renew, right-size, consolidate into a competing tool, or eliminate. Each recommendation includes a migration path and estimated savings.
Renewal & Negotiation Calendar
We build a 12-month renewal calendar with negotiation priorities, benchmark pricing, and the leverage points available at each renewal to reduce costs without service disruption.
SaaS Portfolio Review Evaluation Criteria
Before committing to any SaaS Portfolio Review platform, these are the points worth forcing a straight answer on.
Discovery Completeness
SaaS discovery through AP records alone misses credit card purchases, employee-expensed subscriptions, and departmental shadow IT. Evaluate discovery methodology comprehensiveness before relying on the inventory.
Utilization Measurement Quality
Login counts are poor usage proxies — evaluate whether the platform can measure actual feature utilization, active user counts, and data volume to support evidence-based right-sizing.
Contract & Auto-Renewal Risk
SaaS contracts often auto-renew with minimal notice. Evaluate contract management capabilities and renewal notification lead times to prevent unwanted renewals.
Redundancy & Consolidation Opportunity
Identify application categories where multiple tools are in use — file sharing, project management, communications, analytics — and the consolidation savings available.
Shadow IT Risk
Unapproved SaaS introduces data governance, compliance, and security risks. Evaluate the shadow IT discovery capability and the workflow for legitimizing or off-boarding discovered applications.
Negotiation Intelligence
SaaS pricing is negotiable — but requires benchmark data to negotiate effectively. Evaluate the platform's pricing benchmarks and negotiation intelligence capabilities.
"RLM helped us rationalize our multi-cloud spend and identify over $1.2M in annual savings. Their approach was methodical and unbiased — exactly what we needed."
The benchmark comes first. Without a baseline, “savings” is just a number a vendor gave you.
Where This Matters Most
Sector-specific considerations we see repeatedly in cloud and managed services engagements.
A Sample of the Cloud & Managed Services Providers We Evaluate
RLM is vendor neutral. These are among 600+ providers in our evaluation set — inclusion here is not an endorsement, and we are paid by the provider you choose, not by any provider in particular. How that works →
Thinking About SaaS Portfolio Review?
Start with a no-cost conversation with an RLM cloud advisor — vendor neutral, no agenda, just clarity on the right path forward.
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