In a recent LinkedIn Post, THE REVELATOR asked Why you need an Internal and External Metaprise Strategy for optimal Intake and Orchestration capability? and noted that:

• Most large enterprises use between 10-25 procurement software platforms, with some complex organizations exceeding 25. Just for Procurement!
• A 2022 study by Forrester Consulting found that large enterprises use an average of 367 software applications and systems.
• A 2023 report by Zylo found that large organizations deploy an average of 660 Software as a Service (SaaS) applications.

Moreover, the doctor has seen stats:

• as high as 87 individual SaaS products in a single department in larger orgs
• exceeding 40 for Marketing or Sales … when you can’t find more than a half dozen apps that actually do something significantly different

All the doctor can say to this is that if the number of platforms you are using numbers is in the three digits, you don’t need orchestration, you need consolidation!

For example, Marketing and Sales is all lead generation/management and customer prediction/funnel/CRM. With no coherent strategy (beyond maybe SalesForce for CRM), every employee or team will purchase their own set of Apps and the organization will have 5 to 10 apps that more or less do the same thing with 90% overlap. And similar situations abound throughout the organization.

So yes, these organizations need a strategy, and that strategy should be to centralize app decision and management in each department to prevent unnecessary app sprawl. After all, each app you orchestrate costs you even more money than the app subscription cost (as the orchestration app will charge you based on the number of integrations, and how many of those it supports out of the box), which ends up ballooning your overspend to integrate apps you shouldn’t be using in the first place.

Which means that the first thing these organizations need is a SaaS App Optimization platform that can crawl their SaaS purchase and usage data, identify what’s used, identify more-or-less duplicate apps, and identify which app should be consolidated upon based on usage. This will not only reduce costs by over 30% once the unnecessary apps can be dropped (at the end of the current license or payment cycle), but increase productivity (as [cross functional] teams work in the same app ecosystem).

Moreover, this is just the tip of the overspend iceberg. Once the first round of consolidation is done, these organizations need to tackle SKU sprawl in their enterprise platforms, and their ERP, Cloud Host, and Back-Office Systems in particular where the common vendor strategy is to offer “bigger discounts” when the client purchases packages that contain modules they don’t need or more seats than they will actually use, which, even with the bigger discount percentage off of list price, are still designed to cost the organization more than they should be spending. To do this, they will need to use a vendor, like Green Cabbage that we recently reviewed, that are experts in enterprise software system purchases and know how to unbundle these consolidations and get you insight into market pricing on a SKU basis for hard-nosed fact-based negotiations.

Only once the organization’s platforms have been consolidated and optimized should the organization embark heavily into orchestration, as this is the only way to ensure they don’t do unnecessary work or pay unnecessary costs.