Buying too much software?

Although there has been a slowdown in the global IT economy, the sector has been slowing down less than other sectors such as automotive. However, software purchases from many of the largest providers have continued to grow and I've observed a return of enterprise licensing agreements - all you-can-eat deals, where companies can deploy as much software as they need, without incurring additional fees. Flexible though these deals are, they are also prone to being expensive.

This set me wondering whether companies were actually acquiring more software than they would use, and that we were seeing the return of the shelfware issues that the software industry has always had - as a dark secret. Over the past few weeks I've been running a poll to try to get a handle on the size of the problem, using a number of free Internet tools - Polldaddy and its Polldaddy twitter poll facility. Vanilla twittering of poll links, along with highlighting the poll on Linkedin.com and Facebook status pages also helped to spread the work.

The results show that many companies have bought significantly more software than they are currently using. The current results can be seen at http://linkbee.com/A3FOC, or add your own vote at http://linkbee.com/A3FOD. Without having worked through all of the calculations yet, I'd hesitate to give a single figure that puts a dollar value on this excess purchasing - but it'll be in the hundreds or millions of dollars range, each year. A few of the highlights of the poll - 22% said they had bought 10-125% more software than they were using; 17% said they had bought 25-50% surplus; and there were even 15% had over-purchased by ore than 50%. Of course, some surplus gives business flexibility - but this too much flexibility costs a lot of money.



Of course, there are lots of questions about the methodology - as it doesn't have the same control over sampling, for example, as would be found in traditional research methods. Nevertheless, the results are quite startling.