How SAM Experts Can Justify the Need for a SaaS Management Platform

Businesses are rapidly adopting the cloud-first strategy and moving away from traditional, on-premise applications. By 2025, nearly 99% of companies are expected to use at least one SaaS solution —a type of cloud-based software that enables organizations to centrally manage, optimize, and govern their software portfolios through cloud-hosted platforms. 

With this shift underway, software asset management (SAM) professionals like you are compelled to reassess your approach to software asset management. In a Software as a Service (SaaS) environment, you deal with sprawling app stacks, decentralized purchases, and hidden usage. In such a scenario, the old SAM tools, which are typically on-premises applications, lag in managing the software stack compared to modern cloud-based software.

SaaS Management Platform (SMP) can help you cut through the noise. Let’s explore how SMP can benefit your organization while also allowing you to build a compelling business case to gain leadership buy-in for a SaaS management platform.

What is SAM, and Why SaaS Management Complements It

Software asset management (SAM) is the practice of tracking, optimizing, and securing software assets throughout their lifecycle. Traditionally, SAM focused on perpetual licenses and on-premise software. However, as organizations adopt more SaaS solutions, SaaS digital asset management and cloud digital asset management have become critical.

SaaS Management Platforms (SMPs) complement traditional SAM by providing visibility, automation, and control over cloud-based assets. Together, SAM and SMP create a unified IT asset management (ITAM) strategy that ensures compliance, cost efficiency, and operational agility.

‍The Limitations of Traditional SAM in Managing SaaS Applications

Traditional SAM tools undoubtedly excel at managing and tracking perpetual licenses and on-premise software. Traditional management software is typically optimized for maintaining a software inventory of on-premises applications, automating inventory tracking, and compliance for installed software. However, they fall short when it comes to managing SaaS applications and create the following challenges for SAM experts:

1. Decentralized purchasing: Employees can subscribe to SaaS apps without IT approval, leading to uncontrolled spending.
2. Shadow IT: Unauthorised SaaS usage often goes undetected, creating compliance and security vulnerabilities.
3. Lack of usage visibility: Traditional tools cannot accurately track who uses which SaaS apps and how often. That makes it difficult to optimize licenses.
4. Frequent updates and changes: SaaS apps get regular updates, thus tracking features and compliance requirements becomes difficult.
5. Complex licensing models: SaaS often employs subscription-based or user-based pricing, which can be challenging for traditional software asset management tools to manage effectively.
6. The poor integration capabilities of traditional SAM tools prevent automated provisioning and deprovisioning of user accounts. This gap leads to inefficient license management and potential security risks when employees leave the company.

To address these limitations, you need a specialised SaaS management platform to provide a complete overview of your SaaS stack. 

Key Components of SaaS Management Platform

HCL BigFix SaaS Management offers a comprehensive suite of features designed to optimize SaaS usage, enhance security, and streamline IT operations. Having the right tools is crucial for optimizing SaaS usage, enhancing security, and streamlining IT operations. The platform is structured around four core pillars:

1. Discover – SaaS Management

• Comprehensive Visibility: Gain insights into all SaaS applications, including those acquired through shadow IT, to prevent unauthorized usage and ensure compliance. Maintaining an accurate inventory of all SaaS applications is essential for effective visibility and control.
• AI-Powered Contract Scanning: Utilize artificial intelligence to extract and reconcile contract data, reducing manual efforts and improving accuracy in license management.
• Financial Impact Analysis: Assess the cost implications of your SaaS stack to identify areas for potential savings and optimization.

2. Optimize – SaaS Management

• License Optimization: Identify underutilized or redundant applications and reassign or reclaim licenses to eliminate waste.  The platform helps optimize saas licenses by tracking license entitlement, identifying underutilized applications, and reclaiming licenses from unused ones to maximize value and control costs.
• Feature-Level Usage Tracking: Analyze specific features within applications (e.g., Zoom meetings or Teams chat) to ensure you're only paying for what you use.
• Benchmarking: Compare your SaaS usage and spending against industry standards to uncover smarter, lower-cost alternatives.

3. Renew – SaaS Procurement

• Streamlined Renewal Process: Automate renewal workflows and approval processes to ensure timely and cost-effective contract renewals. The platform tracks renewal dates and manages licensing agreements, helping you avoid lapses, unnecessary expenses, and legal risks.
• Vendor Comparison: Evaluate vendor offerings to ensure competitive pricing and terms.
• Usage-Based Negotiations: Leverage detailed usage data to negotiate more favorable deals and prevent overpayments.

4. Govern-  Identity and Access

• Automated Onboarding/Offboarding: Integrate with HR systems to automatically provision and deprovision user access to SaaS applications, enhancing security and compliance.  Integration with single sign-on solutions further streamlines user access and strengthens security controls.
• Self-Service App Catalog: Empower employees to request access to approved applications through a centralized portal that serves as a service desk, enabling users to submit software requests for review and approval, thereby reducing IT workload and enhancing the user experience.
• Access Reviews: Regularly audit user permissions to ensure compliance with internal policies and external regulations.

How SAM Experts Can Justify SaaS Management Adoption: 6 Strategic Arguments

1. Build a Strong Business Case for a SaaS Management Platform

To get your leadership buy-in for a SaaS Management Platform (SMP), you must highlight its business impact and show how an SMP directly supports business priorities like cost control, operational efficiency, and risk management. Here are a few points to help you build your business case.

Cost Savings

SMPs help cut waste by:

• Spotting and removing unused or duplicate subscriptions
• Providing real usage data for smarter contract negotiations
• Automating license reclamation from inactive users
• Guiding license rightsizing based on actual needs

Example: Gartner (Software Asset Platform Magic Quadrant, March 2025) estimates that the average organisation spends over $1,000 per employee on SaaS Applications, but that 25% of that amount is wasted. That’s $250 per employee per year. So, if you have 1000 employees, that’s $250,000 of waste. Run a similar analysis on YOUR organisation, and this will give you a starting point to see the immediate ROI that SaaS Management can provide.

Efficiency Gains

With an SMP, your team can:

• Centralise SaaS oversight in one place
• Automate user onboarding and offboarding
• Streamline new app requests with approval workflows
• Offer a self-service portal for quicker access to approved tools

Risk Reduction

SMPs help tighten security and compliance by:

• Managingshadow IT before it becomes a problem
• Ensuring apps meet data privacy standards (like GDPR, CCPA)
• Flagging unauthorised usage or risky vendors

Connect SMP Benefits to Your Company’s Bigger Goals

For example, if digital transformation is a priority, explain how an SMP offers the visibility and control needed to scale SaaS safely. For cost containment, highlight the platform’s analytics that help forecast spend and find consolidation opportunities. For growth, demonstrate how an SMP maintains control over SaaS sprawl while facilitating faster onboarding and tool adoption.

2. Prove Value Through Complete Visibility and Accurate Usage Data

With an SMP, your organisation gains:

Real-time Insights

An SMP integrates directly with your SaaS apps, providing accurate, up-to-date data on how licenses are being used. For example, HCL BigFix SaaS Management offers over 500 integrations that enable you to track active licenses and their usage, providing the insight you need to make informed decisions.

Centralised Data for Better Decision-making

By pulling information from various sources, such as SSO, HRIS, finance systems, and contracts, SMPs provide a consolidated view of your entire SaaS portfolio and eliminate data silos. As a result, you can make informed decisions about software usage and license management, leading to significant cost savings.

Feature-level Tracking

Beyond basic license tracking, SMPs enable you to monitor specific usage, such as the number of meetings held in Zoom or the frequency of DocuSign usage. This detailed data helps you identify underutilized features and adjust your subscriptions accordingly, optimizing costs.

3. Showcase Financial ROI From Effective License Management

SMPs provide you with practical tools to help reduce costs and manage licenses more effectively, making a strong case for their adoption. These platforms enable organizations to manage software licenses more effectively, ensuring proper allocation and usage.

They automatically track usage and highlight unused or redundant licenses. For example, HCL BigFix SaaS management’s dashboard can show you what’s been bought, provisioned, and used, making it easy to spot and fix inefficiencies.

SMPs also help you stay on top of renewals and avoid surprise charges by creating automated calendars and sending reminders. After implementing HCL BigFix SaaS management, you can tap into 500+ connectors for real-time insights, cut SaaS spend by 20% through license optimization, and save over 3,000 hours annually across management and renewals.

HCL BigFix SaaS management’s license harvesting feature takes it a step further by identifying underutilized licenses, reclaiming them, or adjusting subscription levels at renewal. This ensures you're only paying for what you truly use.

4. Highlight the Advantages of Security Risk Mitigation and Compliance

Unmanaged SaaS apps can seriously raise your organisation’s security risks. Employees might unknowingly share sensitive data or fall for phishing attempts. Plus, forgotten or unused accounts can leave doors open for cyberattacks.

SMPs like HCL BigFix SaaS management help tackle these issues by giving you full visibility into your software stack and offering key security features like:

• Self-service app catalog: Let's employees request access to approved apps directly via Slack or MS Teams, streamlining the process without losing control.
• App access reviews: Helps you regularly audit user permissions and prevent unauthorised access. You can even automate reviews for compliance standards like SOC 2 and ISO 27001.
• Privileged access management: Monitors and controls access to sensitive systems to prevent unauthorized use and misuse.
• Time-based access: Allows temporary access for specific roles or projects, then automatically removes it.
• Provisioning & deprovisioning workflows: Automates onboarding by recommending tools for new hires and ensures all access is revoked when someone leaves.
• Deprovisioning for inactive users: Automatically revoke access for dormant accounts to eliminate hidden security gaps.

These tools help maintain compliance with regulations like GDPR2 and HIPAA3 by tracking data movement, creating audit trails, and flagging any potential issues early. 

5. Streamline Contract & Vendor Management and Enable Efficient Negotiations

With smart tools and clear insights, HCL BigFix SaaS Management helps you take a more strategic and efficient approach to SaaS procurement.

Contract Management

• HCL BigFix SaaS Management pulls all your vendor contracts into one secure dashboard—no more digging through spreadsheets or scattered folders.
• It utilizes AI-driven metadata extraction to automatically extract key contract information, such as payment terms and usage limits, so you always have the important details readily available.
• The renewal calendar updates automatically using this contract data and sends alerts for renewal and opt-out dates, helping you stay ahead of auto-renewals and plan better.

Vendor Management

• You can search for solutions using plain English. Simply describe your problem, and HCL BigFix SaaS Management will suggest tools that best fit your needs.
• It connects you with peers to see what similar companies are using, giving you more confidence in your choices.
• The platform shows reviews, pros, and cons pulled through machine learning, so you don’t have to jump across review sites.
• A feature prioritisation tool filters out the noise and highlights only the features that matter in your industry.
• Additionally, a side-by-side comparison tool enables you to easily compare vendors based on pricing, features, support, and more.

Renewal Management

• HCL BigFix SaaS Management provides you with insights backed by benchmarking data, allowing you to compare your SaaS usage and spend to industry standards.
• You’ll spot where you might be overspending or underutilising tools compared to others in your space.
• Renewal cards highlight key information, such as contract value and vendor spend, providing a solid foundation for negotiating better deals.
• By using real usage enter renewal talks with leverage.

6. Improving Operational Efficiency and Streamlining Workflows

SMPs can simplify day-to-day operations by automating tasks that typically consume excessive time and energy. With the right workflows in place, your team can stop chasing repetitive work and start focusing on what matters.

Here’s how SMPs make things easier behind the scenes:

Renewal Workflows

No more last-minute surprises. Tools like HCL BigFix SaaS Management start the renewal process up to 90 days in advance. They loop in the right people, share usage insights, and highlight areas for optimization, so your team has time to make informed decisions, not rushed ones.

Procurement Workflows

Instead of messy email threads, employees can request new software through Slack or another central spot. The requests are processed through a built-in approval chain, ensuring smooth, secure, and compliant operations while minimizing shadow IT.

Provisioning and Deprovisioning

The system can automatically grant new hires access to the necessary tools based on their role. When someone exits, it pulls access across all apps; no follow-up is needed. That means better security and no wasted licenses.

License Harvesting Workflows

These platforms monitor usage patterns and flag underutilized or inactive licenses. Depending on your setup, it can ping the user or manager, or simply retrieve the license after a set period. Either way, you stop paying for tools no one's touching.

The big picture of SMP adoption is less manual effort, fewer mistakes, and faster processes. So, you can present to your leadership that it’s not just about automation, but about improving your organization's agility in managing its SaaS portfolio and making the business more nimble.

Take the Next Step 

As a SAM expert, you now have compelling reasons to justify the need for a SaaS management platform. To transform your SaaS management strategy, experience firsthand how HCL BigFix SaaS Management can work for your business. Contact us today.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Can a SaaS Management Platform Integrate With Our Existing IT Infrastructure?

Yes, the best SMPs are designed to integrate seamlessly with your existing IT infrastructure.

They typically offer APIs and pre-built connectors for popular systems, such as SSO providers, HRIS, and financial software. This integration capability ensures smooth data flow and enables comprehensive SaaS management across your organisation.

2. How Does a SaaS Management Platform Handle Data Security and Privacy?

SMPS prioritises data security through encryption, access controls, and regular security audits. They comply with industry standards, including SOC 2 and GDPR.

Additionally, these platforms enhance your overall security posture by providing visibility into shadow IT and ensuring proper access management across your SaaS applications.

3. Can a SaaS Management Platform Help With Software Budgeting and Forecasting?

Absolutely. SMPs provide detailed spend analytics and usage trends, enabling accurate budgeting and forecasting.

They offer insights into upcoming renewals, potential cost savings, and growth patterns in SaaS usage. This data-driven approach allows you to create more precise budgets and make informed decisions about future software investments.

SAM experts face new challenges as businesses shift from on-premise apps to SaaS. Learn how to justify your leaders' need for a SaaS management platform.

4. What is ITAM and SAM?

ITAM (IT Asset Management) manages all IT assets, including hardware, software, and cloud resources, throughout their lifecycle to ensure efficiency, compliance, and cost control.

SAM (Software Asset Management) focuses specifically on software, tracking licenses, optimizing usage, and managing SaaS and on-premise applications. Together, ITAM and SAM help organizations control costs, reduce risk, and improve operational efficiency.

5. Why is SaaS rightsizing important for enterprises?

SaaS rightsizing ensures organizations pay only for what they actually use. It optimizes license allocation, reduces waste, improves compliance, and provides actionable insights for cost-effective SaaS management. Implemented via a SaaS management platform, it drives efficiency, saves costs, and supports better IT governance.