Let’s face it. Times are hard, with a myriad of factors causing stress on the global economy. If you’re an owner or manager of just about any business, you’ve likely been keeping a wary eye on the looming recession, already affecting both the US and Europe, and predicted to worsen over the coming year. Recessions wreak havoc on businesses, with decreased sales and profits spurring businesses to take whatever measures are necessary to cut costs. Some businesses even face bankruptcy and closure.

Often, businesses react to a recession by turning to “solutions” that include layoffs, reduced investments, and slashed research, development and marketing budgets. While cutting costs may be necessary to stay afloat, these tactics may have negative impacts on the health of your business. You end up with a reduced, overloaded workforce that’s more likely to experience burnout, low productivity, and less satisfaction in their jobs, and risk harming your competitive edge by losing traction in innovations and your ability to reach your consumers.

It’s all in the numbers

For businesses that rely on software to get their jobs done—and these days, what business doesn’t?— there may be a better way to reduce costs: effective software license management.

Don’t underestimate the impact of your software license costs. As stated in a 4-year, global software waste study conducted by 1E, The Real Cost of Unused Software, which concluded that a staggering one third or more of all software spend is wasted, “Cutting the waste out of software spend by reclaiming what goes unused would give organizations back almost 35% of their budget to spend on the kind of innovation that will give them competitive edge.”

Recent statistics show that small businesses spend nearly 7% and mid-sized companies spend over 4% of their revenue on IT, while larger companies are closer to spending around 3% of their revenue on software costs. And these costs are only rising as companies rely more and more on sophisticated IT to do everything from customer relations to product development.

Do you know the true cost of your wasted software licenses?

Regardless of the size of your business, no one has the money to waste on inefficient software license management; yet many companies today lack understanding of the true cost of business software, and whether their licenses are under-serving or over-serving their employees. Neither case helps your bottom line.

Some licenses may be entirely unused, while other licenses are in high demand and insufficient to reliably keep your workforce productive. Network licenses shared among your workforce may be inadvertently taken up during non-working hours or by someone out of the office on leave, wasting expensive licenses and leaving too few for others who need them to do their work.

If you haven’t been managing your licenses using a tool that’s made for the job, you’re likely overspending on your licenses. The only question is, how much? Users of License Statistics, a leading license management solution, have reported slashing as much as 30% or even more in license software costs, in-line with the results of the study performed by 1E.

Get the help you need to cut software license costs and improve productivity

Clearly, with many software licenses costing multiple hundreds or even thousands of dollars a year, not to mention related costs for support and hardware, your savings realized by cutting down on software license waste could be considerable. On top of these savings, consider the intrinsic value of increased productivity and efficiency associated with having licenses available when they’re needed.

License Statistics not only gives you clear, concise information about your license usage to help you make smart decisions about your IT spend; it actually helps you to regain idle licenses–say, from the person who’s gone on vacation or left for the day and accidentally left a license checked out–by detecting and taking back idle licenses so they’re available for other users. Surpassing the capabilities of most other license management software tools, License Statistics is a complete solution, with support for over 30 different license managers and usable even for desktop applications and custom software.

Unlike reductions to staffing, R&D, and marketing, there is no down-side to reducing spending on wasted software licenses. If you’re looking for a tool to help you get the most out of your software licensing budget in these belt-tightening times—and statistics show you should be—look no further than License Statistics.

Get to know License Statistics