The Perils of Licensing Software You Don't Use - Isn't It Time to Reevaluate?
Are you even using that system you're paying for? I'm Max Clark. This is a story that happened recently so I figured I'd share it with you. So in this case, the story centered around a phone system and this company's phone system was coming up for renewal. A UCaaS, a cloud based system is antiquated.
Speaker 1:I mean, this is one of the original kind of platforms out there and not great something that they should probably not be using, but the executive and ownership team, it's like, we've already got it in place. It's working great, and we're just gonna continue to paying for it. And something happened internally that bubbled up to the COO of the company and I don't know what the actual initial thing was but what it triggered was are we actually using this thing that we're paying for that we think that we're using because every single one of our employees gets a license they all get phone numbers. They get this software installed, and this is what we're supposed to use and we haven't really been paying attention to it. Now what happened for this company was they actually looked into it and they opened up their admin interface for this platform and they started looking at call history.
Speaker 1:And they were just doing really, really rudimentary stuff. Like, are people making and receiving phone calls via our phone system that we're paying a fortune for? And what they found was is that they were not. They were not using it. And then they started asking their employees, do you use a phone system?
Speaker 1:No. Why not? Because it sucks, and I cannot make or receive phone calls. So I've forwarded the phone number to my cell phone, and I use my cell phone instead. And this was an extremely common answer.
Speaker 1:It was known within the workforce that the phone system was unusable, that the softphone that was on the desktop did not work, that you could not make or receive phone calls, that it was a waste of time, and to just use your cell phone instead. Now this company was a mix of company owned cells and employee reimbursed devices. There were some compliance issues with doing this. This is opening up one of those, like, my goodness. This is just it's gonna be a nightmare kinda scenarios.
Speaker 1:And the deeper they got into this, the deep the more they found out that they had probably been paying for this platform for 2 years without using it or more. And that was shocking. That was actually more than 2. So so start a pandemic. Right?
Speaker 1:So so where we at right now? We're about almost 4 years in. So they were, needless to say, shocked about this. And this drove a process to terminate with that provider and to switch and find a provider that actually met their needs. This is where we came in and what we actually helped them through.
Speaker 1:And they selected a platform and deployed it, and they're very happy with it, and their employees are very happy with it and people are using it and they've got stats to prove it and the quality is fantastic and they are adhering to their compliance requirements and they're not wasting money on something that they're not using anymore. So it's a reminder that just because you bought it and you paid for it doesn't mean it's actually being used or that it's right or that people like it or that it's meeting your needs still and there's a lot of inertia to keeping platforms in place that just because they've been around for a long time but that's not a good reason and that's not a valid reason to not take a look at and go through and use the reporting, especially if you're dealing with anything that is cloud based. It's going to give you some measure of reporting to tell you what's actually going on. And mind you, if just for a licensing and cost standpoint, are you licensed correctly? Are you over licensed?
Speaker 1:That's a significant amount of potential cost savings or or waste. It's a massive amount of potential waste if you're not keeping track of this and actually looking at license utilization. But it will also tell you if your workforce is using the software that you think that they're using, if they're figuring out workarounds to it, are you capturing the data that you need to capture? Are you adhering to compliance that you need to adhere to? Whatever the case may be, go on, on, and on, and on.
Speaker 1:And whether or not that's a decision you wanna maintain. Licensing software that nobody's using is probably not a great idea. So why are you doing it? Just stop wasting. So I'm Max Clark.
Speaker 1:Hope this helps you. Let me know in the comments below.
