Why Cutting Friction Beats Cutting Tools

Enterprise IT teams are under more pressure than ever to control costs without slowing down the business. And with large organizations now spending close to $5,000 per employee per year on enterprise tools, the instinct is often to slash licenses, consolidate platforms, and trim the stack until the spend graph looks more reasonable.

But Forrester’s latest research, presented in their webinar “Beyond Tool Sprawl: Mastering the Digital Work Hub”, makes one thing very clear: The real cost driver isn’t the number of tools. It’s the friction between them.

The Hidden Cost of Tool Friction

Tool friction shows up everywhere:

• Too many apps doing the same thing
• Teams storing the same data in different places
• Slow, duplicated workflows
• Poor visibility into what’s actually used
• Shadow IT ballooning outside procurement control

Forrester calls out that organizations aren’t overspending because people use too many tools. They overspend because nobody has a reliable, centralized understanding of what exists, how it’s used, or whether it’s necessary.

In other words: it’s not tool sprawl, it’s visibility sprawl.

Why Cutting Tools Fails (And Often Backfires)

When organizations attempt mass tool consolidation without grounding it in real usage data, they risk:

• Degrading productivity
• Removing tools that key teams quietly rely on
• Forcing people into inefficient “one size fits all” platforms
• Increasing shadow IT as teams bypass procurement to get their job done

The result? You cut the wrong tools, frustrate teams, and often end up increasing total spend.

Forrester’s message is simple:
Don’t reduce tools. Reduce friction.

And reducing friction starts with knowing exactly what’s installed, who’s using it, and why.

Where Licenseware Fits: Cutting Friction With Better Insight

This is the gap we built Licenseware to solve.

Licenseware’s Collector: See What You Actually Have and What’s Actually Used

Most companies think they know their stack until they run the Collector.

The Collector gives organizations clean, reliable visibility into:

• Every software product is installed across devices and servers
• Actual usage vs theoretical entitlement
• Orphaned, outdated, or duplicative tools
• Hidden costs from rarely used or shadow IT apps

This eliminates the guesswork. You stop relying on spreadsheets and rough estimates and start making decisions based on real-world usage patterns.

Software Inventory Manager: Rationalize, Categorize, and Reduce Tool Sprawl

Once you know what you have, the next step is making sense of it.

The Software Inventory Manager automatically:

• Categorizes your software estate
• Groups tools with overlapping functionality
• Highlights redundancy across teams
• Provides rationalization recommendations
• Surfaces opportunities to streamline workflows, not just cut licenses

Instead of blindly consolidating apps, IT can build a thoughtful, data-backed rationalization plan that preserves productivity while eliminating friction and waste.

Cutting Friction = Cutting Costs (Without Cutting Innovation)

Forrester’s research reinforces what we see every day at Licenseware:
Organizations don’t need fewer tools, they need smarter visibility, better usage insights, and structured rationalization.

With the right platform, companies can:

• Reduce licensing waste
• Eliminate duplicate functionality
• Boost team productivity
• Improve governance
• Cut spend without compromising innovation

This is the foundation of a healthy digital ecosystem.

And it starts with knowing your software estate better than the vendors do.