To a business, scoring goals is like driving revenue. More goals, more sales, and that means you should always be a winner, right? And everyone celebrates the ‘wins’ and the people responsible for them.

But what about savings? Can’t they have a major impact on a company as well? Think about this. Profit is the real measure. If a $2B company saves $4M in software spend that has just as much impact on profit as an additional $66M of new revenue.

In the recent Champion League Finals in Kiev there is a great example of the relationship of scoring and savings. In the first 30 minutes, Mohamad Salah, who scored an astounding 44 times this year, was injured and retired from the pitch. Liverpool was never the same. Then, Loris Karius the Liverpool Goalkeeper had a meltdown. If anyone isn’t aware, Loris Karius’ double error had a major impact on Liverpool’s Champions League 3-1 final defeat to Real Madrid this past fortnight.

With the score goalless, the German goalkeeper rolled the ball on to the toe of Karim Benzema, allowing the ball to trickle into an empty net. The former Mainz man then saw Gareth Bale’s speculative 40-yarder slip through his fingers to see the Spanish side go 3-1 ahead. Jonathan Liew in The Independent described it as “Loris Karius grasping at the ball like a man trying to catch snow.” Is Karius the Andy Dibble of our time?

What could have been the result without those costly errors and the most prolific scorer out of the competition? One can only imagine.

“Saving” money or reducing costs around software spend is much more certain. These are still the key drivers for businesses as they try to manage the need for innovation especially over disparate environments. As far back as in 2011, ITAM Review were talking about potential cost savings through Software Usage / Metering:

“Substantial cost cutting opportunities exist in monitoring usage of purchased applications. Depending upon the level of maturity, enterprises that implement software usage capabilities will achieve savings of 5% to 25% in the first year. After the first full cycle of vendor contract negotiations, the savings will likely stabilize at 2-3% in subsequent years.” – ITAM Review

So as a business – you have a choice. You can rely on scoring all the big goals at the right time or you can focus on the balanced business play of protecting your profits and implement cost savings measures to ensure your software costs are the lowest they can be.

Scalable Software delivers comprehensive IT Asset Inventory and Usage Metering with the market’s quickest implementation and fastest time to value. By gathering highly granular software usage data, Asset Vision identifies both unused and under-used software to facilitate a reduce, re-use and recycle approach to radically impact software licensing, maintenance and subscription costs.