From Spreadsheets to Strategy: What a Full SAM Program Is Really Worth

That pause is the most expensive silence in IT. Software is now the second-largest line in most technology budgets, growing faster than almost anything else outside AI, and in a majority of organisations nobody owns the question of whether it is being used. The licence data sits in one spreadsheet, the contracts in a shared drive, the renewal dates in someone's calendar, and the audit defence in a PowerPoint that was last updated the night before the vendor arrived.

Software Asset Management was supposed to fix this. In many companies it has not, because it was never run as a program. It was run as a project, a tool purchase, or a person. This article sets out what the industry's own research says the gap is worth, in money and in hours, and what changes when SAM is implemented as a full program rather than a workbook.

The numbers: a 5 billion dollar discipline guarding 1.4 trillion

Start with scale. Gartner's 2026 forecast puts worldwide software spend at about 1.44 trillion dollars, up 15% on 2025. The market for SAM tools and services that governs that spend is small by comparison: analyst estimates for 2026 cluster between 4 and 6 billion dollars, growing 15 to 17% a year. In other words, organisations spend well under half a percent of their software budget on managing it.

Now look at what the reports say is leaking. Flexera's State of ITAM research has asked practitioners for years how much of their software spend is wasted, and the answers barely move: in 2023 respondents estimated 36% of desktop software spend, 33% of data-centre and 32% of SaaS spend was wasted. In 2024 even advanced practitioners put the figure at 30% for desktop and 20 to 22% for SaaS, data-centre and cloud. In the 2026 edition, optimising software spend is the number one SAM priority, and a new leak has opened: 59% report rising wasted AI spend and only 31% have visibility into their AI software at all.

The recovery side is just as consistent:

• Gartner's long-standing benchmark, drawing on more than 800 client inquiries, found that organisations with mature, tool-automated licence optimisation reported roughly 30% lower software expenses within the first year. The levers were configuration optimisation, licence recycling and SAM tooling.
• Flexera: 55% of SAM programs saved more than 1 million dollars in the previous year and 16% saved more than 10 million. The top sources were licence reuse to avoid new purchases (83%), better vendor negotiation (83%) and cutting maintenance on unused software (81%). Savings rose with program maturity.
• Forrester Total Economic Impact studies on the leading SAM platforms land at 420 to 430% ROI over three years.
• Audit exposure is the other half of the case. Flexera reports 45% of organisations spent more than 1 million dollars on audits over three years, and 23% spent more than 5 million in 2025 alone. Published cases include DBS Bank cutting audit claims from 15 million to 200,000 dollars, Aviva saving 75 million pounds over five years and EDEKA saving 6.2 million euros on SAP.

The time nobody budgets for

The money gets the headlines, but the hours are where most SAM teams actually feel the pain.

A single vendor audit consumes around 194 IT hours on the EMA benchmark used in Ivanti's ITAM calculator, and ITAM Review estimates the end-to-end process at about seven months. Building an initial licence position by hand is worse: one USU case documented by Forrester needed roughly 11,300 FTE hours just to establish the baseline. That is five people for a year, producing a spreadsheet that is out of date the day it is finished.

With a mature program the picture changes. Forrester found audit-trail effort cut by 30% in the first year. Customers of the major platforms report audit preparation going from months to weeks and prep time falling by three quarters. EDEKA halved its SAP audit preparation. The Snow TEI valued SAM-team productivity gains alone at about 359,000 dollars over three years, and 36% of customers cite labour savings as part of their ROI.

The honest summary for a CFO: a full SAM program cuts the hours spent on audits and manual licence work by 30 to 75%, and frees one to two FTEs of reconciliation effort in a mid-sized enterprise. Those people do not disappear. They move from building the evidence to using it: renegotiating the agreements that matter, rationalising the application portfolio, and increasingly, bringing the same discipline to cloud commitments and AI systems.

“That is the real cost of running SAM on spreadsheets and slides. It is not that the spreadsheet is wrong. It is that the most expensive people in the function spend their time maintaining it instead of acting on it.

A full SAM program, not another tool: the Tech Value Program

We built SofClo because we kept seeing the same thing: organisations that had bought a discovery tool, hired a licence specialist and still could not answer the CFO's question. The missing piece was never data. It was the program around the data: goals, owners, evidence, a roadmap and a cadence that keeps it alive.

SofClo's Tech Value Program implements that program end to end, in one platform, mapped to the IAITAM key process areas. It runs in four phases:

1. Program and plan. Vision, goals and a maturity assessment per scope, rated Crawl, Walk or Run, with optional community benchmarking. The result is a single roadmap, not a wish list.
2. Operating model. Team structure, stakeholder map, RACI, and the catalogues and tooling each stream needs, so everyone knows who owns what before the first renewal lands.
3. Optimisation, policy and process. Every action is tracked to a value outcome: hard savings (reclaimed licences, terminated resources) or cost avoidance (right-sized renewals, penalties not paid, shadow IT caught early), against budgets and cost codes. Governing documents and workflows live in the same place.
4. Commercial, compliance and risk. Agreements, renewals and audit risk tied to each vendor, so the audit letter is answered from evidence that already exists rather than assembled in a panic.

Three things make this different from a SAM tool with a dashboard bolted on.

First, the program is the product. Analysts see their tasks, audits and renewals. The program lead sees initiatives, savings, maturity and master-data health. The executive gets a one-page Program Charter, generated from the live program data, that answers why, what, how, when and value, ready to hand to the CTO or CFO. Nobody re-types anything into a slide.

Second, value is counted per action, from day one. Savings and avoidance are not an annual estimate; they accumulate as the team works, which is what turns SAM from a cost centre into a function with a P&L.

Third, the same engine runs FinOps and AI governance. The goals, owners, evidence and value tracking that make a SAM program work are exactly what cloud commitments and AI registers need. Teams that start with SAM extend into those streams without a second platform or a second set of spreadsheets.

What proactive actually looks like

The shift from reactive to proactive is easy to say and hard to picture, so here is the same SAM team, before and after the program.

The last row is the one that matters most. The analysts, licence specialists and program leads in SAM are experienced, scarce and expensive. The question is not whether the organisation can afford a SAM program. It is whether it can afford to keep those people maintaining workbooks.

Where to start

If your organisation spends more than 50 million SEK a year on software and SAM still lives in spreadsheets, the industry research says you are carrying 10 to 15 million in recoverable cost and several thousand hours of avoidable manual work. You do not need a two-year transformation to go after it.

A Tech Value Program starts with a maturity assessment, which takes hours, not months, and gives you a roadmap and a first set of actions with their expected value attached. From there, every reclaimed licence, right-sized renewal and avoided penalty is counted as it happens, and the Program Charter is ready whenever the CFO asks.