Three months into COVID, our clients are buying software at a pace I've never seen. Tools for communication, project management, document signing, video, analytics. Every week there's a new subscription. Every month the stack gets more complex. Nobody's asking whether these tools will still make sense in twelve months. They're solving today's problem. I understand the urgency. I'm worried about the aftermath.
What You Need to Know
- Crisis-driven tool adoption is creating SaaS sprawl across NZ enterprises
- Most tools adopted under pressure won't survive past the crisis
- A simple evaluation framework can prevent the worst purchasing mistakes even under time constraints
- Integration costs are always higher than licensing costs over time
The SaaS Spending Surge
73%
of enterprise organisations increased SaaS spending during the first quarter of COVID lockdowns
Source: Blissfully SaaS Trends Report, Q2 2020
The pattern is consistent across our client base. A need emerges. Someone finds a tool that addresses it. They sign up. The tool works well enough for the immediate problem. Then another need emerges. Another tool. By the time the crisis stabilises, the organisation has fifteen new subscriptions, three of which overlap, two of which nobody actually uses, and one of which has become load-bearing infrastructure that nobody planned for.
This isn't a criticism of the people making these decisions. When your entire organisation goes remote in a week and you need a way to sign documents digitally, you don't run a three-month procurement process. You get DocuSign and move on. That's the right call in the moment.
The problem is when "right call in the moment" becomes the permanent stack by default.
A Quick Evaluation Framework
You won't have time for a full evaluation during a crisis. That's fine. Here's a fast framework that takes thirty minutes and prevents the worst mistakes.
1. What Problem Does This Solve? (5 minutes)
Write it down in one sentence. If you can't, you don't understand the problem well enough to buy a tool for it. "We need video conferencing" is clear. "We need a collaboration platform" is too vague to evaluate against.
2. What's the Integration Surface? (10 minutes)
Does this tool need to connect to anything? If it's standalone, the risk is lower. If it needs to integrate with your CRM, your ERP, your identity provider, the complexity increases significantly. Every integration is a maintenance commitment.
I've never seen an enterprise tool that was as easy to integrate as the sales demo suggested. Then add a buffer.
John Li
Chief Technology Officer
3. What's the Exit Cost? (5 minutes)
If you stop using this tool in six months, what happens to the data? Can you export it? Is there a migration path? Or does it become a locked vault of institutional knowledge that you're paying to access?
4. Who Owns It? (5 minutes)
Every tool needs an owner. Not an administrator. An owner who's responsible for whether it's working, whether it's adopted, and whether it should be renewed. Unowned tools become shelfware faster than any other category.
5. Does It Overlap? (5 minutes)
Check your existing stack. You might already have 80% of this capability in something you're already paying for. Microsoft 365 includes forms, workflows, video, file storage, and project management. Most organisations use about 30% of what they're already licensed for.
30%
average feature utilisation rate in enterprise SaaS tools
Source: Productiv SaaS Intelligence Report, 2020
Common Traps
The "Free Trial" Accumulation
A tool that's free for thirty days is not free. It costs the time to evaluate, the effort to adopt, the disruption of abandoning it when the trial ends. If you're not willing to pay for it, you probably shouldn't be trialling it.
The "Everyone's Using It" Fallacy
Popular isn't the same as right. Every organisation has different constraints, different integration requirements, different team capabilities. What works for a fifty-person tech startup may not work for a five-hundred-person enterprise with legacy infrastructure and compliance requirements.
The Feature Comparison Trap
Don't pick tools based on feature checklists. Pick them based on the three features you'll actually use daily. The tool with forty features and a clunky core experience will lose to the tool with ten features and an excellent core experience. Every time.
What To Do After the Crisis
When the immediate pressure eases, and it will, schedule a tool audit. Every subscription, every login, every integration. Map them. Identify overlap. Identify unused tools. Identify tools that have become critical without planning.
Then make deliberate decisions about what stays. Not based on what was purchased, but based on what the organisation actually needs going forward.
The worst outcome is a bloated, overlapping, poorly integrated tool stack that nobody chose strategically and everyone tolerates because "we've already set it up." That's technical debt in a different form, and it compounds the same way.